Congress’ Colonial Gene

AS BRITAIN GETS its sixth prime minister in eight years (Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak, Starmer), the Indian National Congress mimics several colonial traits.

Britain began to eye India in the late 1500s. King Henry VIII’s break with the Church of Rome in the Vatican had alienated post-Reformation, Protestant England from the rest of Catholic Europe. It was Brexit 1.0.

Britain did not yet exist. Nor did the United Kingdom. It would be 1707 before the kingdoms of Scotland and England decided to merge to form a new nation called the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

Why did the Scots and the English, who despised each other and had fought interminable battles against each oth­er for centuries, come together to estab­lish a new country? Largely because new­ly Protestant England’s trade with Catholic Europe, angered by England’s break with the Vatican, had plunged. New territories in Asia were necessary to replace some of the trade revenue lost in continental Europe.

That was the genesis of the East India Company. Queen Elizabeth I signed its founding charter in 1600, three years before her death.

The Mughal Empire, at its zenith in 1600 under Emperor Akbar, treated upstart English traders with indifference. They were granted trad­ing rights in Surat but little else. The English kept their heads down. The Mughal court in Agra was among the wealthiest in the world. England was a small, relatively poor kingdom.

Adrift in Catholic Europe, English seafarers began to occupy land in North America through the 1600s. They embarked on the centuries-long transatlantic slave trade from Africa to the Caribbean and America. It was a cruel but profitable enterprise.

By 1707, the Scots and the English, recognising the commercial opportunities in trading with Asia and Africa, put aside their historical differences and merged their kingdoms to form the United Kingdom.

The timing couldn’t have been better. By 1707, the Mughal Empire was in retreat. The Marathas failed to replace it. The East India Company, which had waited 157 years for this opportunity, stepped into Bengal in 1757.

Fast forward to 1947. After 190 years of British rule, India lay systematically impoverished. In the 1600s when Britain (still England then) first coveted India, average per capita income in the two countries was broadly similar.

In 1947, the gap had widened over 100-fold. Britain had lifted itself to one of the world’s wealthiest nations while India had been reduced to one of the world’s poorest.

As damaging as the forced impoverishment of India by the British Empire was, the attempt to divide India by religion, caste, language and region was equally malignant.

Congress helped India win freedom but carried forward the traits of the departing colonists. Divisions over religion were exacerbated by giving differential treatment to Hindu and Muslim personal laws.

Caste became a permanent vote catchment. BR Ambedkar had intended reservations to be temporary. Congress, in power for nearly 55 of India’s 77 independent years, made them permanent.

The colonial gene the British had left behind permeated Congress’ porous skin. Caste, religion, region and language were used by the British to keep India in the stranglehold of the British Empire.

After Independence, which Winston Churchill fiercely opposed, Britain employed Pakistan to keep India in check. Throughout the past seven decades, British policy favoured Pakistan over Jammu & Kashmir. The official line was neutrality. The underlying strategy was to use Pakistan as a British-American strategic asset.

Having injected caste and religion into India’s blood­stream, partitioning India into three countries, Britain left its most enduring imprint on India: Macaulay’s children.

Colonised minds were taught distorted history in schools. British colonial atrocities were airbrushed. India’s pre-colonised ‘backwardness’ was stressed. The fact that the Mauryan dynasty under Emperor Ashoka had united most of India 2,300 years ago when England was a mass of warring tribes rarely entered either Indian or British history books.

Congress hasn’t been able to exorcise its colonial gene. It still seeks to divide India on caste as Churchill did in a venomous speech in the House of Commons in 1946 as Independence loomed.

The 1919 Rowlatt Act gave police the power to arrest any person without any reason, trial or judicial review. In 1975, Congress imposed Emergency with exactly the same powers.

Macaulay’s progeny has kept the colonial gene alive with its fraudulent narrative of an India with a democratic deficit, an undeclared Emergency and a failed economy.

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