Author: Ajit Datta
Publication: Firstpost.com
Date: September 16, 2022
URL:      https://www.firstpost.com/opinion-news-expert-views-news-analysis-firstpost-viewpoint/kartavya-path-tucker-carlson-and-the-queen-how-india-was-the-victim-of-british-loot-and-coloniality-11266731.html?s=03

Queen Elizabeth II’s death and the debate it has brought to the forefront globally are an opportunity for India to set the record straight

Last week, India’s national capital came to a standstill as the Central Vista was inaugurated. A flagship project of the Modi government, the stretch connecting India Gate to the Rashtrapati Bhavan was refurbished and shorn of every trace from the British era. The stretch had been, arguably, the most overt when it came to colonial vestiges of significance. Other than the British-era buildings, the iconic road connecting both landmarks was known as the Rajpath, a direct translation of King’s Way. It was named thus to commemorate King George the Fifth’s visit to his colony. Narendra Modi renamed the road to Kartavya Path. A canopy had stood there, housing a statue of King George under it till as late as 1968. A statue of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was erected in its place by the Modi government, and inaugurated by the prime minister himself.

Two statements that Modi made in his speech that evening stood out. One, Modi referred to Bose as the “first Pradhan of Akhand Bharat”. And two, while referring to the project he was inaugurating, he said the symbol of slavery had now been consigned to history. Later that night, news streamed in that the queen of England had died. Many could not help but notice the peculiar coincidence.

Subhas Chandra Bose evokes extreme reactions in India’s political discourse, and therefore, it was no surprise when once again on this occasion, he emerged at the centre of the debate. However, with the queen’s death, the global discourse turned to monarchy, Britain and colonialism. Whether the British empire had been a force of good or evil, and therefore what the acceptable reaction was to her majesty’s death from the empire’s erstwhile subjects in its erstwhile colonies, quickly became a bone of contention.

And then came Tucker Carlson’s monologue. Unfortunately for Tucker, he was taking on a hair-brained woke professor who had gotten it right, perhaps the only time in her life. In a now-deleted tweet, the professor had referred to the queen as the “chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire” as she lay on her deathbed. Insensitive? Maybe. Mistimed? Certainly. Untrue? Definitely not. But expectedly, the professor drew immense flak. Tucker refuted her claims by using the example of India to highlight the benefits of British colonialism. “When the US government withdrew from Afghanistan after twenty years, we left behind airstrips, shipping containers and guns. When the British pulled out of India, they left behind an entire civilisation,” Tucker proclaimed.

Tucker could not have chosen a worse example, and worse terminology than ‘civilisation’. It is a matter of historic record that at a time when the ancestors of present-day Indians were building large ports and establishing cities with multi-storied buildings and elaborate drainage systems, the Caucasians were hunting and gathering in the jungles. It is also a matter of historic record that the land which Tucker calls home was discovered mistakenly by European explorers looking for the fountainhead of civilisation, namely India. One shudders to imagine a scenario where the explorers would have actually found India. Instead of native Americans, Tucker’s ancestors would have committed history’s largest genocide on Indians, and then perhaps Tucker would have delivered his monologue every night from a television studio in Noida.

Whether Tucker was simply being a good soldier for Western civilisation, or is an unfortunate victim of the mammoth British public relations machinery, is anybody’s guess. Perhaps no people in human history have unleashed the kind of unprincipled and genocidal barbarity that this little island consistently pulled off in different parts of the world in the span of four centuries. But the whitewashing blitzkrieg resulting in its successful rehabilitation as a respectable member of the international community is mind-boggling, more so because its vast repertoire of crimes continues to hide in plain sight even today.

The little island nation’s big-ticket achievements in the past four centuries include establishing settlers’ colonies from Australia to the Americas, and often using genocide to wipe out many native races which inhabited these lands. They include openly looting wealth and different kinds of assets worth trillions of dollars from India, driving Indian artisans out of business, destroying India’s traditional education systems, and driving successive generations of Indians into penury. They also include orchestrating famines to kill millions of Indians, Irishmen and others. They include attacking China because the Chinese refused to buy narcotics from them, and prevailing finally by successfully turning millions of Chinese into opium addicts. They include being the source of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the India-Pakistan conflict and many other conflicts that continue to wreak havoc internationally. At the heart of almost every one of these big-ticket items is a commercial motive. As Napoleon Bonaparte had famously quipped, it is indeed a nation of shopkeepers.

Britain’s actions all around the world in the past four centuries are a matter of historical record. And yet today, when one considers Nazi Germany, North Korea or the Taliban as untouchable models for any civilised society, colonial Britain walks away unblemished. Millions of people including those living in their erstwhile colonies make harmless and fun associations when Britain comes up — the Union Jack, the London Bridge, the Big Ben, Shakespeare, your favourite football club, fish and chips, British humour, and that British accent. Millions of people around the world tune in to watch royal weddings. Former colonies fly their flags at half-mast upon the queen’s death, with orders for it being issued under letterheads celebrating seventy-five years of their independence. However, this article is not about what is acceptable, and to what degree the United Kingdom and its people as we know them today must be held accountable for the crimes of their ancestors. The point is that we are clearly dealing with dangerous spin-doctors who are able to mould our sense of history and the world effortlessly.

Volumes can be written about the reality of the British empire and how skilled they have been at hiding it in plain sight. And perhaps, it is exactly in this light that we must reconsider the entire political debate around Subhas Chandra Bose once again. After 2014, public discourse in India has evolved to the point where the official version of India’s freedom struggle has been considerably undermined. The admission of British prime minister Clement Attlee, who signed off on India’s independence, that it was Bose and not Gandhi who drove the British out, the role of the revolutionaries in shaking the British empire at its foundations, the military intelligence reports about the unprecedented anti-British sentiment after the INA trials, the naval mutiny of 1946, and other such facts are now increasingly seeping into mainstream Indian consciousness. However, if the discourse ends up revolving around whether the Congress Party really brought India her independence or simply inherited the country from the British and took credit, we would once again miss the wood for the trees.

The Congress is a spent force today, and since decades, it has stopped being the biggest beneficiary of the official version of India’s freedom struggle. Seventy-five years into Independence, perhaps the time has come for India to realise that the biggest beneficiaries of the official version of the freedom struggle are the British and the West at large. Tucker Carlson is merely a symptom. The story that it was Ahimsa and Satyagrahas that melted British hearts and compelled them to exit the subcontinent in the most respectable, graceful and peaceful manner, is a story that almost exclusively benefits the British. In fact, it is this story that stands as the centrepiece in the elaborate net they have weaved, which allows them to justify their actions. For if India was truly the ‘White Man’s Burden’ as they liked to call it in the initial years of colonialism, and that the highlight of the Raj was to instill enlightenment values in this land of elephants and snake-charmers, then the exit could only have been respectable. Moreover, it portrays the British as benign and reasonable, responsive to the noblest of motives like those of Gandhi’s, and therefore worthy to be considered a responsible power in the post-colonial era.

What Bose pulled off essentially discredits this entire narrative. On the one hand, ample evidence exists that the threat of the INA, and the INA trials which first set off the naval mutiny of 1946, followed by mutinies in the Royal Indian Air Force and the British Indian Army, are what forced the British to leave. But on the other hand, the fact that the INA was not a militant organisation fighting the colonizers from within the territories they occupied, is not stressed on enough. The INA was declared as the official army of the Azad Hind or the Provisional Government of Free India, which Bose established in 1943. It was headquartered in Singapore, but let us not be under the illusion that it was a government-in-exile. Azad Hind was a sovereign country. It controlled territory in the Northeast of India and the Andamans and Nicobar Islands, it issued its own currency, it was recognised by many countries around the world which had no compulsion to toe the British line, and it had a government machinery in place with Bose as the Prime Minister. As such it fulfilled every criteria of statehood- a population, defined territory, a government, and the ability to enter into diplomatic relations with other states.

Bose’s stated aim for the Azad Hind had been “to launch and conduct the struggle that will bring about the expulsion of the British and their allies from the soil of India”. With the Azad Hind’s army, the INA, ultimately being responsible for overthrowing the British, a case can be made that Azad Hind was the precursor to the Indian Republic as we know it, making Bose India’s first prime minister. Of course, the Azad Hind had collapsed by the time the British left India, and one could say that the Indian republic as we know it came about only after that. This would however erase the historical reality of a sovereign Indian state existing on Indian territory prior to the departure of the British, and playing the central role in overthrowing the British through warfare. After all, isn’t it exactly this historical reality that the British version of the Indian freedom struggle, which happens to be India’s official version too, seeks to censor?

Narendra Modi is on the money when he talks of erasing India’s colonial past and Netaji being undivided India’s first “pradhan” in the same breath. For the most important colonial relic that India must erase is its own official version of the freedom struggle, carefully crafted to give the colonisers a free pass. The queen’s death and the debate it has brought to the forefront globally is an opportunity for India to set the record straight. Unfortunately for the vocal minority that often labels Veer Savarkar’s followers as collaborators of the British, one cannot possibly be a bigger collaborator than those who subscribe to and expound the official version of India’s freedom struggle. Kartavya Path is only the beginning; it is time for India to discharge her kartavya.

-The writer is an author and political commentator. He has authored the book, ‘Himanta Biswa Sarma: From Boy Wonder to CM’. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.