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Tuesday, September 3, 2002
05:13 p.m.
Anachro-bollocks update: TV to prove Indian partition all the UK's fault!
As any fule kno, as far as TV is concerned, 'no footage, no story'. (Hence, nearly 2 million killed in the Congo in the last few years of war scarcely showed up on the news radar.)
The converse, it seems, also applies: they've dug up some film - colour film (black and white is so over!) - of the partition of India, so we're to shown the event as if it happened yesterday, and with the news agenda of the Guardian and Channel 4 News:
"the full extent of the suffering inflicted when Mountbatten, the last Viceroy in charge of the continent, pulled out in 1947, is about to be revealed as never before."
Love the 'post hoc propter hoc'! Of course, it's a puff piece, rather than actual journalism, but revealing for all that.
"....frames shot at the time of the Partition of India that have stunned audiences at early screenings and already provoked argument among eminent historians - some of whom have drawn comparisons with ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Rwanda."
You would have thought that the 2,000 odd killed in Gujurat in 2002 would have been more apposite. Many killed under the direction of the same organisation - the RSS - responsible for much of the Hindu end of the slaughter before and after Partition. And intimately linked with the BJP that governs India today.
"Terrible scenes, not seen before, of thousands of dispossessed refugees trailing across the newly created border with Pakistan will make it hard to defend the memory of colonial India as a caring, orderly place, which was run in increasing collaboration with Indians."
Only the determinedly pig-ignorant could conceive of British India as either caring or orderly. Unlike, say, the French in Africa with their 'mission civilisatrice', the British conceived of their imperial role as limited. The word 'caring' would never have crossed their minds as characterising British rule in India. There was merely, in most times and places, an absence of riot: with 100,000 Englishmen to 100-300m odd Indians, how could more be expected?
There was an increasing Indian element in government (getting on for half of senior civil servants in 1939 were Indians). In September 1946, an interim government was established whose Home Minster, Patel, straight away decided to deprive the Viceroy of the benefit of the intelligence service. So that, when the violence came, the British were largely in the dark as to what was going on.
[The same Patel is reported as saying of the RSS that
"[they] are not thieves and dacoits, they are patriots." (Seervai Partition of India (1994) pxxx)). Whether he had in mind giving free rein to RSS 'patriotism' at the time he cut off intelligence to the British must be open to question.]
Andrew Roberts, author of a hatchet-job on Mountbatten in his Eminent Churchillians, says
'It is high time that programmes such as these should bring us sharply up against our own failed responsibilities at the end of Empire.'
An extension of 'no footage, no story' is the childish conceit that, just because we see horrible things happening on our screens, something could be done to stop them happening.
In 1945-7, the UK was bankrupt; under the Shylockian terms of the American Loan, the UK was required to render sterling held by non-residents convertible into foreign currency by July 15 1947 (ie, a month before Indian independence). By the time convertibility was suspended (five days after Indian independence), a good deal more than a pound of flesh had been lost. (And this on top of the effects of the previous cripplingly cold winter.) Marshall Aid would still take a good while to arrive.
There was no money or men to stop the millions in the Punjab and Bengal, gripped by the fanaticism of the RSS and its Moslem counterparts, from tearing each other apart. Indians outnumbered Europeans by 2-3000 to one; could the business end of the task have been put in the hands of sepoys? Could they be reasonably expected to fire on co-religionists?
The operative reason for the blood-bath was the inability of Congress and the Moslem League to negotiate an agreed framework for independence. The initiative, and the effective power on the ground, was theirs and their supporters'.
But, faced with a magic-lantern show, even the archivist at the Imperial War Museum turns into a Princess Di-style empathomaniac:
'I don't think it can be viewed impartially',
he says.
Never mind the history, feel the emotion.
You have been warned!
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