The Hindu : The sunny side of the 'Raj'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jan 18, 2003

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The sunny side of the 'Raj'

By Hasan Suroor

LONDON JAN. 17. It is unlikely that many in India would be familiar with Niall Ferguson. Even in Britain, he was largely a marginal figure until his controversial Channel 4 documentary based on his book, Empire, about the sunny side of the Raj catapulted him into prominence.

Ferguson is Professor of Political and Financial History at Oxford University and his theory is really a modishly dressed up version of that old chestnut about the British empire not having been such a bad thing after all. And he has statistics to flaunt: in India, life expectancy rose from 21 to 32 years thanks to the British rule and huge investments were made in railways, irrigation and a host of other areas of infrastructure. In comparison, the Mughals, who preceded the British, did peanuts for India.

The Raj, it is argued, also set the stage for a free press and many of the democratic institutions that India and other former British colonies today boast of. To cut a long story short, the empire was a benign, liberal and civilising enterprise without which much of Asia and Africa would have still been living in the dark ages. He acknowledges that some pretty nasty things happened on the way but these were aberrations — a term which should find resonance in India where it is often used these days to explain away every new atrocity) — and, on balance, the benefits from the Raj (to Britain as well as its colonies) outweighed its downside.

Prof. Ferguson joins issue with the BBC for telling children on its website that the empire was built by ``killing lots of people...and stealing their countries'', and that it collapsed because of resistance led by ``various people like Mahatma Gandhi, heroic, revolutionary protester, sensitive to the needs of his people''.

There is nothing startlingly original about Prof. Ferguson's story but the difference is that whereas previously such views were met with disdain there is now a new in-your-face political ``incorrectness'' abroad that makes it fashionable to hear and applaud them. And Prof. Ferguson should know. He recalls that as a young student at Oxford in the early eighties he had his political ambitions cruelly cut short when he dared to oppose an Oxford Union motion which said : ``This House Regrets Colonisation''.

Yet, two decades later, he is being feted for airing even stronger views on the subject while poor Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, is ridiculed for criticising the legacy of the empire. Remember the snide comments, Mr. Straw provoked for saying recently that many of today's festering political disputes in Asia, Africa and the Arab world — including the Kashmir dispute — are a hangover of the Raj?

To be fair, Prof. Ferguson has been consistent in his views. What has changed is the British mood with indifference, or even nostalgia, replacing the guilt and embarrassment which once marked the discussions about the empire.

This sits oddly with the moral outrage that the vast majority of Britons feel over the alleged human rights abuses in Zimbabwe as they revile England cricketers for agreeing to play in Harare. Even if the comparison is not quite direct, the fact is that empire also was about abusing human rights and, indeed, it has been suggested that an apology by the Queen to her former subjects would be a civilised way of dealing with it.

But the Ferguson School does not want to get bogged down in the ``morality'' of the empire. ``The broader question of the morality of empire is probably impossible to answer, for it is hard to know what the alternative would have been,'' writes a reviewer of Ferguson's book in The Spectator and argues that the 20th century criterion of morality cannot be applied to the project of an earlier era, adding:

``To characterise the Victorian colonisation of India or Africa as immoral is rather odd.

One might as well criticise the Norman conquest of England as a breach of the U.N. charter and demand an apology from the current mayor of Rouen.''

In The Times, Prof. Ferguson has been hailed for his ``gloriously politically incorrect'' view of the empire and The Sunday Telegraph endorsed his claim that the Raj ``offers rich sources of pride''.

Never mind, the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre and the Boer concentration camps. They were just ``aberrations'' like so much that has happened in post-colonial India!

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