| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"A Veteran" |
| Date: |
11 May 2007 01:47:41 PM |
| Object: |
Doomed to repeat history? |
Soon after dawn on May 11 1857, 150 years ago this week, the Mughal
Emperor
Bahadur Shah Zafar was saying his morning prayers in his oratory
overlooking
the river Jumna when he saw a cloud of dust rising on the far side of
the
river. Minutes later, he was able to see its cause: 300 East India
Company
cavalrymen charging wildly towards his palace.
The troops had ridden overnight from Meerut, where they had turned their
guns on their British officers, and had come to Delhi to ask the emperor
to
give his blessing to their mutiny. As a letter sent out by the rebels'
leaders subsequently put it: "The English are people who overthrow all
religions . As the English are the common enemy of both [Hindus and
Muslims,
we] should unite in their slaughter . By this alone will the lives and
faiths of both be saved."
The sepoys entered Delhi, massacred every Christian man, woman and child
they could find and declared the 82-year-old emperor to be their leader.
Before long the insurgency had snowballed into the largest and bloodiest
anticolonial revolt against any European empire in the 19th century. Of
the
139,000 sepoys of the Bengal army, all but 7,796 turned against the
British.
In many places the sepoys were supported by a widespread civilian
rebellion.
There is much about British imperial adventures in the east at this
time,
and the massive insurgency it provoked, which is uneasily familiar to us
today. The British had been trading in India since the early 17th
century.
But the commercial relationship changed towards the end of the 18th, as
a
new group of conservatives came to power in London, determined to make
Britain the sole global power. Lord Wellesley, the brother of the Duke
of
Wellington and governor general in India from 1798 to 1805, called his
new
approach the Forward Policy. But it was in effect a project for a new
British century. Wellesley made it clear he would not tolerate any
European
rivals, especially the French, and planned to remove any hostile Muslim
regimes that might presume to resist the west's growing might.
The Forward Policy soon developed an evangelical flavour. The new
conservatives wished to impose not only British laws but also western
values
on India. The country would be not only ruled but redeemed. Local laws
which
offended Christian sensibilities were abrogated - the burning of widows,
for
instance, was banned. One of the East India Company directors, Charles
Grant, spoke for many when he wrote of how he believed providence had
brought the British to India for a higher purpose: "Is it not necessary
to
conclude that our Asiatic territories were given to us, not merely that
we
draw a profit from them, but that we might diffuse among their
inhabitants,
long sunk in darkness, the light of Truth?"
The British progressed from removing threatening Muslim rulers to
annexing
even the most pliant Islamic states. In February 1856 they marched into
Avadh, also known by the British as Oudh. To support the annexation, a
"dodgy dossier" was produced before parliament, so full of distortions
and
exaggerations that one British official who had been involved in the
operation described the parliamentary blue book (or paper) on Oudh as "a
fiction of official penmanship, [an] Oriental romance" that was refuted
"by
one simple and obstinate fact", that the conquered people of Avadh
clearly
"preferred the slandered regime" of the Nawab "to the grasping but
rose-coloured government of the company".
The reaction to this came with the great mutiny, or as it is called in
India, the first war of independence. Though it reflected many deeply
held
political and economic grievances, particularly the feeling that the
heathen
foreigners were interfering with a part of the world to which they were
alien, the uprising was consistently articulated as a defensive action
against the inroads missionaries and their ideas were making in India,
combined with a generalised fight for freedom from western occupation.
Although the great majority of the sepoys were Hindus, there are many
echoes
of the Islamic insurgencies the US fights today in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In
Delhi a flag of jihad was raised in the principal mosque, and many of
the
resistance fighters described themselves as mujahideen or jihadis. There
was
even a regiment of "suicide ghazis" who vowed to fight until they met
death.
Events reached a climax on September 14 1857, when British forces
attacked
the besieged city. They proceeded to massacre not only the rebel sepoys
and
jihadis, but also the ordinary citizens of the Mughal capital. In one
neighbourhood alone, Kucha Chelan, 1,400 unarmed citizens were cut down.
Delhi, a sophisticated city of half a million souls, was left an empty
ruin.
The emperor was put on trial and charged, quite inaccurately, with being
behind a Muslim conspiracy to subvert the empire stretching from Mecca
and
Iran to Delhi's Red Fort. Contrary to evidence that the uprising broke
out
first among the overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, the prosecutor argued that
"to
Musalman intrigues and Mahommedan conspiracy we may mainly attribute the
dreadful calamities of 1857?. Like some of the ideas propelling recent
adventures in the east, this was a ridiculous and bigoted
oversimplification
of a more complex reality. For, as today, western politicians found it
easier to blame "Muslim fanaticism" for the bloodshed they had unleashed
than to examine the effects of their own foreign policies. Western
politicians were apt to cast their opponents in the role of "incarnate
fiends", conflating armed resistance to invasion and occupation with
"pure
evil".
Yet the lessons of 1857 are very clear. No one likes people of a
different
faith conquering them, or force-feeding them improving ideas at the
point of
a bayonet. The British in 1857 discovered what the US and Israel are
learning now, that nothing so easily radicalises a people against them,
or
so undermines the moderate aspect of Islam, as aggressive western
intrusion
in the east. The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and western
imperialism
have, after all, long been closely and dangerously intertwined. In a
curious
but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of all three Abrahamic faiths
have always needed each other to reinforce each other's prejudices and
hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the others.
William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857,
has
just been published in paperback by Bloomsbury williamdalrymple.com
2007 The Guardian
History is rife with empire after empire falling victim to its own
greed.
The US/UK relationship is merely another form of the same. It will be an
interesting fall won't it? Blair has had enought sense to resign now,
but
Bush's fate may be far worse. At best history will label him an
incompetent,
but more accurately he is a war criminal. Taken the standards from
Nuremburg, our own show trial for NAZI henchmen, as well as the same
applied
to Noriega and Milosevic, Blair and Bush and many others in both
governments
(from multiple parties in both countreis as well) are in fact war
criminals.
.
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| User: "Docky Wocky" |
|
| Title: Re: Doomed to repeat history? |
11 May 2007 10:08:32 PM |
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a veteran sez:
Events reached a climax on September 14 1857, when British forces
attacked
the besieged city. They proceeded to massacre not only the rebel sepoys
and
jihadis, but also the ordinary citizens of the Mughal capital. In one
neighbourhood alone, Kucha Chelan, 1,400 unarmed citizens were cut down.
Delhi, a sophisticated city of half a million souls, was left an empty
ruin..."
_________________________________
Well, it points out one way to handle terrorrism in Baghdad.
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