Gideon Polya, “India & Pakistan Independence. Huge Cost of Anglo Imperialism & Hegemony”, MWC News, 14 August 2007, not cached by Google.
India & Pakistan Independence. Huge Cost of Anglo Imperialism & Hegemony
India and Pakistan are this week celebrating the 60th anniversary of Independence from Great Britain. It is useful to consider the immense progress made by both countries since finally escaping from under the heel of Britain (aka Perfidious Albion, or the Sassanachs to Scots) after a brutal 2 centuries of remorseless exploitation and oppression.
The bottom-line measure of the success or otherwise of any public policy is avoidable death (avoidable mortality, excess death, deaths that should not have happened). In 1947 the annual death rate in India under the British was a genocidal 3.5% but over 6 decades of post-Independence this has shrunk to a current 0.85% in India, 0.96% in Pakistan and 0.83% in Bangladesh (2003 data) - still well above the roughly 0.4% it should be for high birth rate societies but a VAST improvement over the British Raj conditions (see “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1990”, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007 (copies in the British Library and other major libraries): http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/).
The fundamental reason for the huge avoidable mortality under the racist British was a sustained British public policy of exploitation and deliberate impoverishment of several hundred million South Asians for 2 centuries. We can turn to no less than Winston Churchill in a speech to the House of Commons in 1935 for a clear statement of what this involved - a massive, sub-continental Concentration Camp in which several hundred million people lived on the edge of survival:
“In the standard of life they have nothing to spare. The slightest fall from the present standard of life in India means slow starvation, and the actual squeezing out of life, not only of millions but of scores of millions of people, who have come into the world at your invitation and under the shield and protection of British power.”
This deliberate racist British policy over 2 centuries of highly abusive rule was associated with recurrent famine, from the 1769-1770 Great Bengal Famine (10 million victims) to the “forgotten” World War 2 man-made Bengal Famine (4 million victims) that have been conveniently deleted from most British history books. Thus even Simon Schama’s otherwise excellent “A History of Britain” (BBC, London, 2000) – which describes the horrors of 18th century and 19th century famines in India with the aid of horrifying Auschwitz-reminiscent photographic evidence – fails to mention the WW2 Bengal Famine. Professor G.M. Trevelyan’s classic “”History of England” (Longmans, London, 1960) deletes any mention of Indian famines and indeed only alludes to famine in Ireland in the mid-19th century (1 million deaths, 1.5 million exiled) as a possibility averted by wise English action over the Corn Laws.
The fundamental causes of the immense carnage under British rule in South Asia were violence (brutal British occupation), deprivation (brutal, rapacious taxation to the point of “nothing to spare”), disease (notably cholera spread throughout the subcontinent and thence the world by British railways and shipping) and LYING. Britain, in collaboration with other Anglo countries, notably Racist White Australia, Canada and the United States, is still passively murdering South Asians and Asians, variously through global hegemony, violence, occupation, global warming and lying.
Thus the excess deaths (avoidable deaths, deaths that did not have to happen) associated with US post-1950 Asian Wars now total 19 million; the post-invasion excess deaths in the Occupied Palestinian, Iraqi and Afghan Territories total 0.3 million, 1.0 million and 2.4 million, respectively; post-1950 global excess deaths total about 1.3 billion; and annual avoidable deaths on Anglo-dominated Spaceship Earth total 16 million (10 million of these avoidable deaths being those of under-5 year old infants). And of course, the racist, lying, Anglo mainstream media still resolutely lie by omission over this continuing Anglo carnage.
How has South Asia fared post-independence? The pen-ultimate abuse of the British in South Asia was the Partition that involved some 10 million refugees and perhaps 1 million deaths (the ultimate Anglo abuse being huge excess deaths in South Asia and in the non-European World in general through greedy, profligate Anglo economic hegemony i.e. neo-colonialism). However India, Pakistan and then Bangladesh (Independence from Pakistan in 1971) must be credited with enormous post-Independence improvements despite greedy, racist Anglo domination of the Planet (current annual death rates 0.8-1.0% as compared to 3.5% under the racist British).
Nevertheless South Asia has not done as well as China in removing endemic poverty (principally because they inherited British-style political Establishments with immense capacities for deception, self-deception and LYING. Thus, more specifically, the Indian failure can be seen as due to a combination of lack of democratic will, Russian Communist-derived economic inefficiencies, inherited British class-based unresponsiveness and caste-based unresponsiveness (as compared to an ideological commitment of the Chinese authorities to abolish endemic poverty). The 1950-2005 excess mortality was 465 million for South Asia (2005 population 1459 million), 352 million for India (population 1097 million), 50 million for Pakistan (population 161 million) and 51 million for Bangladesh (population 153 million) as compared to 156 million for China (2005 population 1322 million). It can be estimated that avoidable deaths under 2 centuries of brutal British rule totaled 1.5 billion (see MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/5668/26/ ). The current (2003 figures) annual excess deaths total 5.3 million, 3.7 million, 0.9 million and 0.6 million in South Asia, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, respectively, as compared to zero for China and for Sri Lanka.
India has done very well post-Independence but could do much better when compared to China. Indian media and politicians inherited the same stultifying dishonesty of Western Mainstream media and political Establishments. The British continue to ignore the horrendous reality of the WW2 Bengal Famine (4 million victims, horrendous military and civilian sexual violation of starving women and girls; a 1940s demographic deficit in Bengal of 10 million; possibly due to a deliberate “scorched earth policy by Britain to stop Japanese invasion; and deliberately rubbed out of history by several generations of lying, racist, British historians, writers and politicians) (see “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History”, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 1998 (copies in the British Library and other major libraries) : http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ and Colin Mason, “A Short History of Asia”, Macmillan, London, 2000). But the same IGNORING is exhibited by the Indian and Pakistani Establishments which still substantially ignore endemic poverty in South Asia.
My heroine, brilliant Indian writer Arundhati Roy explained this sustained media and politician lying thus: “the ultimate privilege of the élite is not just their deluxe lifestyles, but deluxe lifestyles with a clear conscience.”(Arundhati Roy in “The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile”, Harper Perennial, London, 2004).
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh can and must do better – and have the excellent example of Sri Lanka (ZERO annual excess mortality) to show them HOW. However South Asia is now facing the horrendous prospect of climate genocide from Western climate criminals, notably the huge greenhouse gas polluters and Kyoto non-signatories, the Anglo countries of the US and Racist White Australia which have annual per capita greenhouse gas pollution about twenty (20) times that of India and threaten South Asia, Africa and indeed the World with climate genocide and terracide (see “War on Terra, Climate Criminals, “Terra” Painting” on MWC News: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/15671/42/ ). The Anglo climate criminals continue to acutely intensify the problem of human survival for South Asia.