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Shashi Tharoor, Congress owes India reparations too

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Sreejith Panickar
Sreejith PanickarJul 25, 2015 | 21:36

Shashi Tharoor, Congress owes India reparations too

Shashi Tharoor’s cogent speech at the Oxford debate has brought back the memories of several colonial symbols from the past. While historians differ about Winston Churchill’s role in creating a deliberate famine in Bengal, majority align with the views Tharoor expressed. It is always interesting to see an Indian rubbing it in to the Westerners, especially in their land, and when the topic is colonialism. Tharoor’s side won the debate; Tharoor himself won accolades, even from Prime Minister Narendra Modi whom his party opposes both on personal and political fronts.

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Tharoor’s avowal of colonial quantifications was a revelation to many. He tactfully presented his thoughts with facts and figures – exactly how he should in a debate. But in the larger perspective, to a round-eyed audience, Tharoor presented only the facts he saw through one eye. The other eye, which should have focused on his own party, was tightly closed. Tharoor won the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha constituency from a Congress ticket. So one should assume that the other eye was already in pawn!

Much like Britain owes India reparations, Tharoor’s own party too owes them. Let’s analyse a few cases:

Commonwealth

Even before becoming a republic, the first Congress government had decided to declare allegiance to the British crown by inducting India into the British Commonwealth. This was against the norms, and the rules were altered through the London Declaration to admit a republic to the Commonwealth. The symbolic head of the Commonwealth is the British monarch. So, Tharoor might want to question his own party as to why they wanted to be under the same British rule he inveighed against, although only symbolically. He may also ask why Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Indian prime minister and the foremost leader of the Congress party, went all the way to London in 1956 and took the Freeman’s oath to be true to the monarch, in presence of the then British prime minister, Anthony Eden!

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The Emergency

Tharoor boasted of the democracy that India is today, and jeered at the way the British governed it for 190 years. Maybe in his moment of brilliance, Tharoor might have forgotten that democracy in India was culled in its infancy by one Indira Priyadarshini for almost two years when she ruled by decree. Elections, which form the basis for democracy, were suspended, several civil liberties were scrapped, and the press was smothered. Despite several attempts, the Congress couldn’t save their one-hit wonder Amethi MP Sanjay Gandhi from allegations of forced sterilisation. Only amnesia and decrepitude can make Tharoor forget them altogether, for he himself had used the names “Priya Duryodhani” and “The Siege” to refer to Indira and the Emergency in his own book The Great Indian Novel.

1984 Anti-Sikh Massacre

When the British Prime Minister David Cameron visited Jallianwalla Bagh in 2013 and said the 1919 mass killings at the place was a “deeply shameful event in British history”, in effect, he was admitting the wrongdoings and transgressions of his predecessors. Even at that time, several people including Congress politicians had censured him for not making a formal apology. And what has the Congress party done about an incident in which its own top leaders were involved? In one of the rare television interviews he has given, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi had admitted that some Congress members were probably involved in the riots that killed innocent people all over India, especially in Delhi. Isn’t that admission enough for Tharoor to demand an apology from his party, perhaps similar in magnitude to his own party’s long-standing demand for an apology from the BJP about the Godhra incident?

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Nepotism

Congress sow the seeds of nepotism in Indian political scene and you have to give it up for them for continuing to do that unchallenged for seven decades. Since independence, members from a single family ruled us for an incredible 38 years, and the party has been headed by them for 34 years. The last elected president of the party was Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, and they could have celebrated the platinum jubilee of that election last year! Do we need to understand Mr Tharoor, that your party is full of people who are still wet behind the ears, politically, so that there are no elections internally?

History

Tharoor was quite vocal about the brutal Bengal famine of 1943-44. The general consensus is that over four million people lost their lives due to this planned massacre, which itself is comparable with Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust figures. If so, why hasn’t our educational system not given the famine due importance in our school books? If today, I ask a random school student: “Who was dangerous; Hitler or Churchill?”, you don’t need to think twice what the answer would be. Our educational system painted a black picture of Hitler, but not of Churchill. Former external affairs minister, K Natwar Singh, wrote in his book Heart to Heart an incident narrated to him by Indira Gandhi. Outside the Westminster Abbey in 1953, Churchill said to her: “You must have hated the British for the treatment meted out to your father”, and the “Iron Lady” replied: “We never hated you.” That’s right! For Indira and India, Sir Winston was/is always an elder statesman and a Nobel laureate! What a shame!

Lal Bahadur Shastri

The death of India’s second prime minister is still a mystery. All we know is that he went to Tashkent, signed a few papers, and was found dead the next morning. There have been several demands, from his family and the public, for a detailed inquiry to crack the secrecy about his death, but the Congress has never been of help. Poisoned or not poisoned, Shastri was dead, and the party moved on. It is nearly 50 years since Shastri’s death, and where are the reparations, Mr Tharoor?

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose

By all means, Netaji was the first head of state of an Indian government, which had international recognition. He disappeared mysteriously while fighting for our freedom, but the successive Congress governments have wanted the public to disregard him like how they did. As if that wasn’t enough, the Congress governments also violated all norms of human rights by snooping on Netaji’s relatives for two decades. Numerous RTI petitions about Netaji’s fate were dismissed and an official inquiry report trashed for no reason in the last 10 years. The current BJP government has inherited this trait from its predecessor Congress governments. As I am Tharoor’s constituent, I personally have corresponded with him on this matter in the past. While he showed great interest in the beginning, his enthusiasm abated gradually, and finally he told me he was more aligned to the theories put forth in the book His Majesty’s Opponent by Sugata Bose, the historian and Netaji relative, whose views on Netaji’s death are rebuffed outright by the larger section of his own family. No reparations, again?

On the whole, while I enjoyed the way Tharoor pointed his finger at the British colonialism and asked for a “sorry” and reparations, I couldn’t help but scorn at the fact that three fingers were pointing back at Tharoor’s own political abode for continuing the colonial style in a slightly different way to this age and time. Tharoor should think how a depleted Japan and a forbidden Germany got rid of their past and became the economies they are today, and reflect on what happened to our own India under the 55 years of Congress rule since independence. We just basked in our past glory. Only an impotent and enslaved nation needs reparations from its colonial masters; what we need are corrections, and that should start from the very political unit to which Tharoor belongs.

Last updated: July 25, 2015 | 21:36
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