Author: Rashmee Roshan Lall
Publication: The Times of India
Date: November 25, 2007
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Church_of_England_head_lauds_British_Raj/rssarticleshow/2569688.cms
The spiritual head of the Church of England
has launched an extraordinary defence of the British Raj, saying it was benign
to India compared with cack-handed American neo-imperialism in Iraq.
Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury,
who officially leads nearly 80 million Anglicans worldwide, told a British
Muslim lifestyle magazine that the British experiment in India was an example
of caring colonialism.
On Sunday, the comments were criticised by
observers as a patronising justification of imperial Britain's grip on India.
Sources said it was surprising that Williams,
a long-term critic of the Anglo-American 2003 invasion of Iraq, was getting
into dangerous historical territory such as the British Raj.
Williams, who is known as a free-thinking
churchman, said, "It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour
energy and resources into administering it and normalising it. Rightly or
wrongly, that's what the British Empire did, in India for example".
He added that "it is another thing to
go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow
clear the decks and that you can move on and other people will put it back
together - Iraq, for example".
The Archbishop's interview was conducted by
Sarah Joseph, a white English convert to Islam who edits Emel. Joseph, a hijab-wearing
Muslim who has, in the past, criticised European attitudes to its large and
growing Muslim community, described Williams' job as "the most political
of religious roles".
Williams said, using words that would be music
to the ears of disaffected British Muslims, that the US, as the only "global
hegemonic power", was trying to accumulate influence and control, rather
than territory. But he said "That is not working" and the result
was "the worst of all worlds".
He said the US had lost the moral high ground
since 9/11 and made a further controversial attack on Western modernity as
a whole, saying it "really does eat away at the soul."
Williams' most pessimistic comments yet on
the state of western civilisation have provoked anger within sections of the
British establishment, even as his pat on the back to the Raj has gone almost
unnoticed.
