Foot in mouth?

IN Opinion | 18/07/2005

You don`t say!

Darius Nakhoonwala

The biggest ant in the journalistic pant last week was the prime minister`s speech in Oxford, where he said that although the British had plundered India, they had also left behind institutions of governance that have served us well. Interestingly, the leader writers - except one in The Hindu - held their peace. It was the columnists who shook a censorious finger at Manmohan Singh.

How dare you, said some? Well done, said the rest bar one -- Inder Malhotra, who got caught between two stools. Writing in The Hindu, to censure or not censure was his dilemma. In the event he ended up leaving the reader very confused. His dilemma was summed up by the tailpiece he put in. "Dr. Singh did refer to the old adage about the sun never setting on the British Empire. But he forgot to add that this was because, in those days, God did not trust an Englishman in the dark".

But he did make a point that the speech writer, at least, should note. "One surprise about the Prime Minister`s oration… he left out the thoroughly professional and admirably apolitical Army which has never been tempted to ape the Armies of Pakistan, Burma (now Myanmar), Bangladesh, and several other former British colonies that have become either military dictatorships or one-party authoritarian states."

The others were more clear. M J Akbar (Asian Age) and T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan (Business Standard) were clear: the prime minister had committed a gaffe. Swaminathan Aiyar (Times of India) and Karan Thapar (Hindustan Times) were also equally clear: he had not.

The burden of Akbar`s song was in the Bengal famine. How could you accuse the British of governing well, he asked, when they left 3.8 million Indians to die of hunger for the larger Imperial cause during the Second World War? Akbar quoted copiously from Amartya Sen to seal his point.

"The British inaction was more mala fide than that. As it happens, even the request for permission to import 600,000 tons of wheat was turned down in London on 16 January (1943, the year of the worst deaths), only a small part of it being met." On the other hand, and please underline this heavily, "On 26 January (1943), the Viceroy wrote to the Secretary of State for India: `Mindful of our difficulties about food I told him (the Premier of Bengal [Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy]) that he simply must produce some more rice out of Bengal for Ceylon even if Bengal itself was short! He was by no means unsympathetic, and it is possible that I may in the result screw a little out of them`." Akbar`s comment was pithy: You screwed a lot out of us, Viceroy! Nearly four million Bengalis were to die of starvation and the good-governance Raj was exporting rice from Bengal to Ceylon!

Srinivasa-Raghavan was also equally scathing. How could you praise a system of governance that was designed to plunder and divide, he asked. "…no other empire, except perhaps the Spanish one in South America, visited as much misery and brought such ruin to its subjects. Of the 190 years (of the British Empire in India) only a very short period, from about 1880 to 1918, was inspired by good faith - and that too not wholly. For example, it is evident from the way the British induced the Muslims to redirect their sense of grievance against them to the Congress, by painting it as a Hindu party. Good governance was thus always subject to unalterable Imperial objectives."

Swaminathan Aiyar, as is his wont sometimes, focused on the critic rather than the criticism. He singled out the historian Irfan Habib who had been the first to criticise Dr Singh. "The ultimate irony is that Habib himself is a creation of the Raj, if only had the eyes to see it." Aiyar`s basic point was the same as Dr Singh`s: the Raj was like the curate`s egg, good in parts. We would never have had liberty, equality and fraternity without it. These notions he said, "didn`t come from Aurangzeb or Shivaji".