Today’s treatment of whistleblowers and RTI users brings to my mind the Trial of Maharaja Nandakumar during the time of Warren Hastings.

In 1775 Mah. Nandakumar had threatened to bring evidence of bribery against Hastings. He probably believed in the British system of justice. But it was the complainant who was finally hanged, accused of forgery !

I quote from Warren Hastings:

In 1787 Sir Elijah Impey had been charged on the Nandakumar ‘murder’ but, through the deployment of a highly skilled defence, he had been acquitted. This meant that the Nandakumar case could hardly be used against Hastings, even though most moderate commentators are agreed that Impey’s conduct of the trial of Nandakumar was highly questionable if not downright censurable…

Isn’t that what is continuing even today ?

Our RTI laws are being diluted by our law makers, and we are letting it happen.

Thanks to Gurnath Prakash for this URL. This is a very useful resource for documenting the colonial loot which impoverished Hindusthan which clocked 33% of the world GDP in 18th century according to Angus Maddison.

http://dsal.uchicago.edu/reference/gazetteer/

Charles Wentworth Dilke (1843-1911), an Liberal politician and apologist for colonialism who presented Britons as a benevolent master race, described Indians in Volume 2 of his book Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-speaking Countries During 1866 and 1867 as, “naked barbarians, plunged in the densest ignorance and superstition, and safe only from extermination because the European cannot dwell permanently in the climate of their land”.

http://www.archive.org/details/greaterbritainre00dilkuoft
http://www.archive.org/download/greaterbritainre00dilkuoft/greaterbritainre00dilkuoft.pdf

In Volume 1 he boasted about the genocide of large indigenous populations:

“The Saxon is the only extirpating race on earth. Up to the commencement of the now inevitable destruction of the Red Indians of Central North America, of the Maories, and of the Australians by the English colonists, no numerous race had ever been blotted out by an invader”.

Addressing the question of whether England could bear the drain of people if emigration to India was allowed, politician Philip Francis (1740-1818) said in April, 1793, that: “The climate of India was of itself a sufficient security against emigration of any consequence from England, for the real purpose of colonization”.

William Bentinck (1774-1839), the Governor-General of India from 1828 to 1835, said: “India may be described as a tropical country, in which the European cannot safely labour in the field, excepting at particular times, and in which the Northern races appear, after a few generations, to lose much of their physical hardihood”.

You can find the Greater Britain volumes and the above quotes in a few books if you search Google Books.

This is worth highlighting:

“But the most damaging effect of colonial role was the rule of damage done to the Indian psyche. The English educated indic has become a mass of contradictions, with very little pride or even curiousity about his own heritage..and is constantly apologetic of who he is..”

But the most damaging effect of colonial rule was the damage done to the Indian psyche. The English educated indic has become a mass of contradictions, with very little pride or even curiosity about his own heritage and has become adept at portraying the past and the present in India in an extremely unfavorable manner and is constantly apologetic of who he is. It is this that will durant remarked on when he made the comment on the damage to a civilization that can never again be retrieved “”…the Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within.” while he made the remarks in regard to the Islamic period of indian history, they ar equally applicable to the British period, if not more so