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add135e
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The Mahatma's singular insight was that self-government would never be achieved by the resolutions passed by a self-regarding and unelected elite pursuing the politics of the drawing room. To him, self-government had to involve the empowerment of the masses, the toiling multitudes of India in whose name the upper classes were clamouring for Home Rule. This position did not go over well with India's political class, which consisted in those ..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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0a9afdf
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He put himself at the head of a movement of irreconcilable imperialist romantics,' wrote Boris Johnson in his recent admiring biography of Churchill. 'Die-hard defenders of the Raj and of the God-given right of every pink-jowled Englishman to sit on his veranda and...glory in the possession of India'. Mahatma
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Shashi Tharoor |
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Indeed there were outstanding examples of good governance in India at the time, notably the Travancore kingdom, which in 1819 became the first government in the world to decree universal, compulsory and free primary education for both boys and girls.)
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Shashi Tharoor |
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68334ca
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Wartime hardened British attitudes to the prisoners as well. Gandhi 'should not be released on the account of a mere threat of fasting', Churchill told the Cabinet. 'We should be rid of a bad man and an enemy of the Empire if he died.' He was quite prepared to facilitate the process, suggesting that the Mahatma should be 'bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and let the viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant and trample [the Maha..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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d3ea13d
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India . . . was like an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed, and yet no succeeding layer had completely hidden or erased what had been written previously. . . . Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety among our people, everywhere there was that tremendous impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages . . . [India] was a world in itself, a culture and a civ..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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d023722
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Sedition was therefore explicitly intended as an instrument to terrorize Indian nationalists: Mahatma Gandhi was amongst its prominent victims. Seeing it applied in democratic India shocked many Indians. The arrest in February 2016 of students at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on charges of sedition, for raising 'anti-Indian' slogans in the course of protests against the execution of the accomplice of a convicted terrorist, a..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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The press, in other words, was free, but some newspapers (the British-owned ones) were freer than others.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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Jawaharlal Nehru put it sharply: the Indian Civil Service, he said, was 'neither Indian, nor civil, nor a service'.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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d2ddc77
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Kerala's Christians belong to the oldest Christian community in the world outside Palestine. And when St Thomas, one of Jesus's twelve apostles, brought Christianity to Kerala, it is said he was welcomed on shore by a flute-playing Jewish girl. St Thomas made converts among the high-born elite, the Namboodiri Brahmins, which meant there were Indians whose families had practised Christianity for far longer than the ancestors of any Briton co..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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7a7130e
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On election days, the burdens of poverty and corruption and of a creaky economic system are put aside, and India celebrates. Many voters dress especially for the occasion... None quite voice the thought, but those who came in a steady stream to vote seemed to be saying that India may have fallen far behind its neighbors in the struggle for prosperity, but as long as it can choose its governments, it can hope for better in the future.
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sociology
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Shashi Tharoor |
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3f0163e
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six decades of Independence have wrought significant change, as exposure to British practices has faded and India's natural boisterousness has reasserted itself. Some of the state assemblies in our federal system have already witnessed scenes of furniture overthrown, microphones ripped out and slippers flung by unruly legislators, not to mention fisticuffs and garments torn in scuffles among politicians. Pepper spray has been unleashed by a..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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fed4175
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Jawaharlal Nehru, who wrote in a 1936 letter to an Englishman, Lord Lothian, that British rule is 'based on an extreme form of widespread violence and the only sanction is fear. It suppresses the usual liberties which are supposed to be essential to the growth of a people; it crushes the adventurous, the brave, the sensitive, and encourages the timid, the opportunist and time-serving, the sneak and the bully. It surrounds itself with a vast..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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3b83b66
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Justice, in British India, was far from blind: it was highly attentive to the skin colour of the defendant.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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e1a953a
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ruled Pakistan directly for a majority of the years of its existence,
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Shashi Tharoor |
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The combination of internal controls and international protectionism gave India a distorted economy, underproductive and grossly inefficient, making too few goods, of too low a quality, at too high a price. The resultant stagnation led to snide comments about what Indian economist Raj Krishna called the "Hindu rate of growth," which averaged some 3.5 percent in the first three decades after independence (or, to be more exact, between 1950 a..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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2e8561b
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The British used the term 'Anglo-Indian' to refer to British people living and working in India, and 'Eurasian' to refer to those of mixed parentage, usually the children of lower-ranking Europeans and 'other ranks' who could not afford to snare one of the women from the 'fishing fleet' and ended up cohabiting with, and in a few cases marrying, Indian women. Today, the descendants of these Eurasians are known as 'Anglo-Indians', a term that..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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Indians were always subjects, never citizens; throughout the days of Empire, no Indian could have presumed to say 'I am British' the way a French African was encouraged to say 'Je suis francais'.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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a39aa31
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It also meant that decisions were increasingly made in offices, behind closed doors, by foreigners with no connection to those whose fates they were deciding. The public display of the rulers' authority was replaced by the private circulation of incomprehensible paper.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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3be3d43
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In the conceptual scheme which the British created to understand and to act in India, they constantly followed the same logic; they reduced vastly complex codes and their associated meanings to a few metonyms.' Laws had to be translated into terms the British could understand and apply. A complicated, often chaotic and always fluid society like India was 'redefined by the British to be a place of rules and orders; once the British had defin..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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d37cdc3
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we cannot blame the British for saddling us with this system, though it is their 'Mother of Parliaments' our forefathers sought to emulate. First of all, the British had no intention of imparting democracy to Indians; second, Indians freely chose the parliamentary system themselves in a Constituent Assembly.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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2b8fd47
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But six decades of Independence have wrought significant change, as exposure to British practices has faded and India's natural boisterousness has reasserted itself. Some of the state assemblies in our federal system have already witnessed scenes of furniture overthrown, microphones ripped out and slippers flung by unruly legislators, not to mention fisticuffs and garments torn in scuffles among politicians. Pepper spray has been unleashed ..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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0ac1461
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The playwright Richard Sheridan was scathing in his denunciation of the Company, whose operations 'combined the meanness of a pedlar with the profligacy of a pirate...
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Shashi Tharoor |
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780764c
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The creation and perpetuation of Hindu-Muslim antagonism was the most significant accomplishment of British imperial policy: the project of divide et impera would reach its culmination in the horrors of Partition that eventually accompanied the collapse of British authority in 1947.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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bd5a232
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The task of dividing the two nations was assigned to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer who had never been to India before and knew nothing of its history, society or traditions. Radcliffe drew up his maps in forty days, dividing provinces, districts, villages, homes and hearts--and promptly scuttled home to Britain, never to return to India. 'The British Empire did not decline, it simply fell', as Alex von Tunzelmann put it. The British were he..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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Sir Rabindranath Tagore returned his knighthood to the British in protest against 'the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India'. Tagore's early ambivalence about the costs and benefits of British rule was replaced after Amritsar by what he termed a 'graceless disillusionment' at the 'misfortune of being governed by a foreign race'. He did not want a 'badge of honour' in 'the incongruous context of humiliation'.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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f50ea5c
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As late as World War II, among the 'few of the few' who bravely defended England against German invasion in the Battle of Britain were Indian fighter pilots, including a doughty Sikh who named his Hurricane fighter 'Amritsar'.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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0d4c91b
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Hinduism, with its openness, its respect for variety, its acceptance of all other faiths, is one religion that should be able to assert itself without threatening others. But this cannot be the Hinduism that destroyed a mosque, or the Hindutva spewed in hate-filled speeches by communal politicians. It has to be the Hinduism of Swami Vivekananda, who, a century ago, at Chicago's World Parliament of Religions in 1893, articulated best the lib..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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6f75799
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If India's GDP went down because it 'missed the bus' of industrialization, it was because the British threw Indians under the wheels.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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This British practice, previously unknown in India, caused long-lasting damage. The historian Jon Wilson has argued that India had a dynamic economic and political order--'a society of little societies'--where constant negotiation between the rulers and the ruled was the norm. India's villages were not self-reliant republics that lived in blissful isolation. They were networked and connected, and it was the destruction of Indian industry th..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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The Empire, in Hobsbawm's evocative words, was 'so easily won, so narrowly based, so absurdly easily ruled thanks to the devotion of a few and the passivity of the many.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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India's share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb's treasury raked in PS100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain's rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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Bengalis say when offered cod, we still have other fish to fry.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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But less than a century and a half later, this Mughal empire was in a state of collapse after the spectacular sacking of Delhi by the Persian Nadir Shah in 1739 and the loot of all its treasures. The Mughal capital was pillaged and burned over eight long weeks; gold, silver, jewels and finery, worth over 500 million rupees, were seized, along with the entire contents of the imperial treasury and the emperor's fabled Peacock Throne; elephant..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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43eba82
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The British ruled nineteenth-century India with unshakeable self-confidence, buttressed by protocol, alcohol and a lot of gall.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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2707fd2
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And the British had the gall to call him 'Clive of India', as if he belonged to the country, when all he really did was to ensure that a good portion of the country belonged to him.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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0c1b0c5
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If the Muslims of the 1520s acted out of ignorance and fanaticism, should Hindus act the same way in the 1980s? By doing what you propose to do, you will hurt the feelings of the Muslims of today, who did not perpetrate the injustices of the past and who are in no position to inflict injustice upon you today; you will provoke violence and rage against your own kind; you will tarnish the name of the Hindu people across the world; and you wil..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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9b7c85b
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The highest officers in the government had the strongest motives to corruption, and therefore could by no possibility attempt to check the same corruption in those below them...
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Shashi Tharoor |
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215446f
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The Indian vessels, a contemporary British observer wrote, 'united elegance and utility and are models of patience [sic] and fine workmanship.' Indian workers were considered expert in all shipbuilding materials--wood, iron and brass
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Shashi Tharoor |
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73382b6
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By the end of the nineteenth century, India was Britain's biggest source of revenue, the world's biggest purchaser of British exports and the source of highly paid employment for British civil servants and soldiers all at India's own expense. We literally paid for our own oppression.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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1421875
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We tend to reduce everyone else to the limits of our own mental universe and begin privileging our own ethics, morality, sense of duty and even our sense of utility. All religious conflicts arose from this propensity to judge others. If we indeed must judge at all, then it must be "according to his own ideal, and not by that of anyone else"."
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Shashi Tharoor |
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253cf33
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it is striking that when slavery was abolished, the British government paid compensation, not to the men and women so inhumanely pressed into bondage, but to their former owners, for their 'loss of property'!)
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Shashi Tharoor |
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2c27434
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Hinduism' is thus the name that foreigners first applied to what they saw as the indigenous religion of India. It embraces an eclectic range of doctrines and practices, from pantheism to agnosticism and from faith in reincarnation to belief in the caste system. But none of these constitutes an obligatory credo for a Hindu: there are none. We have no compulsory dogmas. This is, of course, rather unusual. A Catholic is a Catholic because he b..
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Shashi Tharoor |
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377c007
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Jinnah proved obdurate: he was determined to obtain Pakistan. The Muslim League leader declared 16 August 1946 as 'Direct Action Day' to drive home this demand. Thousands of Muslim Leaguers took to the streets in an orgy of violence, looting and mayhem, and 16,000 innocents were killed in the resulting clashes, particularly in Calcutta.
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Shashi Tharoor |
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61635f6
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She said my problem was that I saw things in people that they didn't see in themselves.
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Shashi Tharoor |