Hyderabad: In a wide-ranging opinion piece for Al Jazeera, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has claimed that the British — during their rule — were responsible for the deaths of at least 35 million Indians.
Mr Tharoor, also the author of An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, has been spearheading the demand for an official apology from the British for atrocities committed during the Raj.
Two years ago, at an Oxford Union debate, he had called for reparations from Britain to its former colonies. He has also in the past referred to former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill as ‘a thoroughly unpleasant scoundrel,’ and explained why the British were also behind the proliferation of certain engineered social evils such as the caste system in India.
Sir Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister of Britain from 1940 to 1945 and again, from 1951 to 1955. In the Al Jazeera column, the member of Parliament suggested Victoria Memorial in Kolkata be turned into a museum displaying the “truth of the British Raj”.
“This famous monument stands testimony to the glorification of the British Raj in India. It is time that it be converted to serve as a reminder of what was done to India by the British, who conquered one of the richest countries in the world (27 per cent of global gross domestic product in 1700) and reduced it to, after over two centuries of looting and exploitation, one of the poorest, most diseased and most illiterate countries on Earth by the time they left in 1947,” he wrote.
Mr Tharoor also deplored present-day Britain’s ignorance of actual war crimes committed by its Rajera officials and soldiers and slammed what he described was the original Brexit. He insisted there be a memorial remembering the lives lost during the turbulent occupation.
“Nor is there any memorial to the massacres of the Raj, from Delhi in 1857 to Amritsar in 1919, the deaths of 35 million Indians in totally unnecessary famines caused by British policy, or the “divide and rule” policy that culminated in the horrors of Partition in 1947 when the British made their shambolic and tragic Brexit from the subcontinent. The lack of such a museum is striking,” he wrote in the Al Jazeera piece.
Several of Mr Tharoor’s articles and speeches on the subject have gone viral online — triggering mass support in India, for a British apology. In fact, he suggested earlier this year that 2019 — the year marking the centenary of the infamous Jallianwala Bagh massacre — will be a “good time” for Britain to apologise for all wrongs committed during its 200-year rule on India.
Appearing on Sky News, the Parliamentarian said India had played a critical role in the wars fought by Britain.
