“In order to restore India to its pristine condition, we have to return to it. In our own civilization there will naturally be progress, retrogression, reforms, and reactions; but one effort is required, and that is to drive out Western civilization. All else will follow.” – Hind Swaraj, M.K. Gandhi
Our long education brainwashes us into not seeing the ‘satanic’ nature (as Gandhiji calls it in Hind Swaraj) of western civilization and its British envoys who completed the task of destroying India. ‘The white sahibs in India’ is a very good eye-opener.
The full book is available online here and given below are some hard-hitting excerpts.
Excerpt 1:
Following the [Jalianwala bagh] massacre, which has often been excused as an act of panic, a deliberate and diabolical regime of terror was established in the city. No Indian will ever forget General Dyer’s “crawling order” by which all Indians who passed along a particular street were made to crawl on their bellies, on pain of instant death. For the slightest indication of “disrespect” to their British masters Indians were publicly flogged, while military tribunals sat daily, dealing out summary “justice” against which there was no appeal. Water supplies were cut off from Indian houses and prisoners were kept in open cages under the scorching sun.
Throughout the whole of the Punjab martial law was imposed. Eighteen death sentences were passed and immediately carried out, while twenty-eight persons were sentenced to transportation for life. To prevent news from reaching the outside world, no one was allowed to enter or leave the Province. Meanwhile an inestimable number of people were killed by the bombing of Punjab villages from the air, and armoured trains which pulled up in these villages massacred all inhabitants within range by indiscriminate firing from machine guns. In one town the biggest schoolboys were flogged, apparently to encourage the others, and at Lahore all students were forced to attend a roll-call four times a day.
Dyer justified his action on the ground that he saved India from revolution. Whether this was the case or not, he certainly did more than any other man to arouse a revolutionary mentality in the Indian people. All over the country meetings of protest were held as the news of the Punjab horrors gradually became known. Festivities organised by the Government to celebrate the Allied victory were boycotted, and the Government’s processions passed down empty streets, where the shops were closed in token of national mourning.
The last act of the Amritsar tragedy was the virtual endorsement of all the actions of the military by a Government which clearly deplored the clumsiness rather than the crime.
Excerpt 2:
The Government’s official publication ‘India in 1929-30’ spoke of poverty as “the most characteristic feature of the rural classes of India.” According to this authority:
“A large proportion of the inhabitants of India are still beset with poverty of a kind which finds no parallel in Western lands, and are living on the very margin of subsistence.”
This poverty is the result of 150 years of extortion. It began in Bengal with the robberies described in the early chapters of this book and a steady rise in the land tax assessment to double or treble the amount exacted by the Indian rulers. It progressed with the policy of annexation, whereby the revenues of Indian States were plundered on the pretext of defence. It was systematised in some of the Provinces by the creation of an Indian land-owning class, which by the year 1900 was paying only 28 per cent of its rents to the Government and keeping the rest of the plunder as a reward for its loyalty.
In the ryotwari provinces a standard levy of 45 per cent to 50 per cent on the gross produce of the peasant, and in some cases of a revenue assessment actually exceeding the gross produce, drove the helpless villagers into permanent indebtedness.
Excerpt 3:
“India had been populous and flourishing, the people thriving and happy,” wrote Horace Wilson of the conditions “for centuries prior to the introduction of European agency.” Unlike previous conquerors, the British, till force of circumstances compelled them to make terms with the reactionary elements of Indian society, excluded the conquered people from all positions of responsibility.
“There is probably,” wrote Holt Mackenzie, “no example of a Government carrying the principles of absolutism so completely through the civil administration of the country, if that can be called civil which is in spirit so military.”
Under such a system, embryonic of modern fascism, Indians were for years “excluded from every honour, dignity or office which the lowest Englishman could be prevailed upon to accept.” By the end of the nineteenth century the villagers, powerless to protect themselves either from the Government or the native parasites whom it shielded, were paralysed with poverty. The results of an enquiry made in 1888 by the Government were so frightful that the authorities kept them secret; but we have the authority of Sir William Hunter that in his time forty millions passed through life with only one meal a day. Another eminent official stated that half of the agricultural population did not get a square meal during the whole course of the year, the standard of “squareness” being the food supplied in the Indian prisons.