The British are infamous for their humor. The funny thing is they laugh over their mistakes and defend their wrongdoings rather than accepting and apologizing for them. In last few months MPs from British Conservative party and some Members of British Parliament have questioned their government’s financial aid program for India and argued that it must be stopped. A few days after India successfully launched its lunar expedition, Conservative Party MP, David Davis said, “The Indians don’t want or need our money. In effect we are sponsoring an Indian Moon launch.” Another Conservative party MP, Phillip Davis called financial assistance idiotic and unjustifiable. “Here we are spending money in a country that has not only got its own space programme but is developing its own overseas aid programme. It is completely unjustifiable and truly idiotic,” said Phillip Davis.
Similar rants from conservative politicians came after Statue of Unity was opened to public weeks back. “To take 1.1 billion pounds in aid from us and then at the same time spend 330 million pounds on a statue is a total nonsense and it is the sort of thing that drives people mad,” said Peter Bone Conservative Party MP. Conservative party government in Britain was responsible for most heinous crimes in India including the deaths during Bengal Famine. The party defended, even the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and funded the defense of General Dyer in British courts. Now after seven decades of independence, despite repeated shaming by intellectuals and scholars, the members of Conservative party are not ready to accept and apologize for their crimes.
As per a recently published article in Colombia University Press, British took away 45 trillion dollars in 173 years. To put it in perspective, the GDP of Britain is less than 3 trillion dollars. Surprisingly, the research was published by Utsa Patnaik, a Marxist economist, “Between 1765 and 1938, the drain amounted to 9.2 trillion pounds ($45 trillion), taking India’s export surplus earnings as the measure, and compounding it at a 5 per cent rate of interest,” said Patnaik in an interview few days after her essay was published. The loot and plunder by British still hampers India’s ability to come out of the clutches of poverty. Winston Churchill, a British Conservative Prime Minister idolized and immortalized by successive British generations was one of the worst genocidal dictators, responsible for the death of millions of Indians.
In fact, the British government intentionally exported food grains and imposed high taxes, thus forced millions of Bengalis to die of hunger and diseases. Millions died due malnutrition and the life expectancy in the country in 1911 was just 22 years. The per capita income of the country increased just by 5 rupees in 45 years from 196.1 INR in 1900 to 201.9 INR in 1945. This was despite the fact that India registered the second largest export surplus earnings in the world for three decades before 1929. The British shipped raw materials, labor and money from India to London all to finance the World War. The rich and powerful of the British lived off the hard earned money of India’s poor, people who couldn’t even feed their family at that point in time!
The British madness over foreign aid is just spectacular. The British are not willing to pay for the ‘loot and plunder’ of their ancestors. In fact the colonizers are not even ancestors, the transfer of Hong Kong to China happened in 1997, which marked end of British Empire. So, many people of this generation are also responsible for crimes throughout the world. Britain was built by looting the colonies throughout Asia, America, and Australia. The British ‘owe’ their wealth to the original habitants of these colonies and now they not willing to pay financial assistance which is less than 1 percent of their total GDP.
It is very true that financial assistance the British government provides is in the ‘interest’ of Britain. Dambisa Moyo, a young Zambian-born economist put a strong case against foreign aid by giving substantive evidence that it is ‘harmful’ to recipient instead of being ‘helpful’. Countries like India do not want British foreign aid. In fact, India denied foreign aid during Kerala floods. India has enough resources to provide relief to its citizens and its economy will overtake that of Britain by the end of this year. So, India does not want a single penny from British government.
What we want is- British Queen Elizabeth II to come to India and kneel in Jallianwala Bagh for the massacre carried out by Colonel Dyer. April 2019 will be 100th anniversary of cruel act and this could be perfect time for British Queen to do this. India also wants British Prime Minister to kneel down in front of the people of Bengal and publicly apologize for Winston Churchill’s deliberate killing of 30 lakh (government estimate) people during the Bengal famine in 1943. And the return of Kohinoor as a ‘symbol’ of returning of all the wealth looted from India. Britain can never return the amount they looted from India because for this, they would have to ‘sell their country in the London Stock Exchange’. So, the return of Kohinoor as a symbolic gesture would be enough. British government should think of doing these things rather than providing financial assistance to India because this is what Indians want, not the measly financial assistance which is less than what India spends on its lunar mission.
