Britain Owes Reparation: Shashi Tharoor at Oxford

On May 2016, Debate on the British colonization of India in Oxford, England. Congress MP and writer Shashi Tharoor vividly debated why Britain owes reparations for its exploitation of the subcontinent , Tharoor’s speech was extensively cherished in India because of the conciseness with which he exemplify how and why expatriate rule demoralized the subcontinent, and how violence and racism were the mandate of those days. 

What’s inimitable in Tharoor’s speech, though, is his sense of humour. The quantifying example which exhibits the humor to the speech “colonialists like Robert Clive brought their rotten boroughs in England on the proceeds of their loot in India while taking the Hindi word loot into their dictionary as well as their habits”.

The Indian handloom weavers who were eminent thru the world and whose merchandises were disseminated around the world, Britain came into India to flourish their own inhabitant. They emanated right in, cracked weavers skims, broke their looms, levied tariffs and duties on their cloth and products and started taking their raw material from India and shipping back, which contrived the cloth flooding in the world's markets with it became the products of the obscure and satanic mills of the Victoria in England. As a result intended the weavers in India befitted beggars and India went from being a world famous exporter of finished cloth into an importer. 

Earlier to this Indians contributed to 27 per cent of the world trade which worsen and came down less than 2 per cent. 

The Best example stating the Tharoor’s speech include the how colonialism kept India into starved. Shashi Tharoor said 15 million to 29 million Indians died due to starvation that to into colonial rule.He further said four million people died in the Bengal famine of the 1940s because then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill diverted food supplies from famine-hit areas to Europe, only to be stacked up as reserved stock.

When sentient traumatized British officials wrote to Churchill about the famine and starvation jeopardizing the region, Churchill wrote back, “Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?” 

This was the condition of India under colonialism. By stating the Indians contribution during World War I and World War II Tharoor quantified the data and said “World War I, one-sixth of all British forces were Indians and 54,000 Indians lost their lives.” He further added that India actually subsidized these wars through taxes as well as supplied ammunition and garments.

 Moreover, Indian tax-payers had to recompense 100 million pounds at the time to endure the expense of the war.The total assessment of entirety taken out of India during the war, Tharoor said, was 8 billion pounds as per today’s economy India had suffered. Even in World War II, the cost that Indians paid was enormous. He said that of Britain’s total World War II dues of 3 billion pounds (in 1945), it unsettled 1.25 billion pounds to India, and no amount of it was interminably compensated. Not only do India and the British have a bygone, they have a very gruesome past as Shashi Tharoor recapped us with his speech at the Oxford Union. “We share with Britain a history of being oppressed for centuries, of bloody massacres, mass arrests, the suppression of democratic rights and the supplanting of our own culture to serve the British interests. Remember Jallianwala Bagh and the Bengal famine?”