Retributions  

Some consistency please?

So yesterday we heard from Aakar Patel why Britishers had left India six decades too early. Mr Patel explained, with great delight it appeared, how if only the Britishers had stayed around a few years more, things in India would have been much better. Indeed, if Mr Patel is to be believed, the modern Indian state is almost exclusively the construct of British colonization. Responding to such an article is sheer waste of time because a selective telling of facts can justify virtually anything: Slavery and genocide included.
But how selective are those facts? Hear it from Mr Patel himself,

Bengal has had two major famines that we know of. The first was in 1770, 13 years after Robert Clive defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah at Plassey. One crore (10 million) people, one fifth of the area’s population, died of starvation that year. Clive committed suicide four years later, but not from guilt.

The second Bengal famine was in 1943, in which thirty lakh people (three million) died. Britain was diverting India’s resources to its war effort. The pain of this famine was observed by the 10-year-old Amartya Sen, who did his research on hunger after that when he became an economist. He went around villages on his bicycle with weighing scales and measured infants for malnourishment. It was for this work that he won the Nobel for economics in 1998.

There were many famines during British rule. One crore (10 million) people died in Central India in a famine that began in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. One in South India in 1877 killed 50 lakh (five million) people. [link]

By Mr Patel’s own reading of history, the wonderful British empire whose virtues he was extolling only yesterday, caused the death of millions of Indians in famines only. While, the inefficient Indian state–despite all its weaknesses–has prevented famine deaths since independence.

And it cannot be stressed enough: Those two articles appeared on successive days. What an intellectually vacuous and dishonest man!