http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-3396388,flstry-1.cms   

Tarun Vijay

This column appears on the eve of the birthday of Krishna, son of Devaki. At the time of his birth, his parents were put behind bars by the King fearing death at the hands of their son, as the gods had prophesied. For Devaki and Vasudev, Krishna’s father, there was no hope, no chance of getting help from any close friend or relative or the awakened citizens of Vrindavan and Mathura- everyone was terror struck, feared for his life in the kingdom of Kamsa, Devaki’s brother.

Yet, Krishna survived. Kamsa was killed. Citizens were provided protection and safety. Kaliya, the great serpent king was humbled and made to respect people who lived on the banks of Yamuna. Krishna fought wars but before every action he tried his best to persuade the wrong doer. When he found the evil empire unrepentant, he simply annihilated the entire clan. Forever. He restored Dharma, the righteousness.

He became an emperor par excellence, he performed divine dance with Gopikas and had his famous Ras Lilas, yet the only Krishna that makes relevance today is the one who used his Sudarshan Chakra , the celestial weapon to re-establish righteousness and overpower the terrorists, deleting their remnants from the earth. He was our ancestor and we are the rightful inheritors of his legacy.

And how!!

Instead of warning and annihilating the demons and terrorists ruthlessly, we are suggesting giving them what they want whole of Kashmir-to buy a peace that will never come to us this way. No body respects a coward and his peace making exercises. Even barbaric Jihadis would respect the words of a brave unyielding challenger and not the phony writers and journalists who would insult their tricolor for a piece of story or fame as a peacemaker pen pusher. We compromised to divide our motherland to buy peace- what we got in return were four wars and death of more than sixty thousand brave young soldiers.

You give Kashmir today for peace, they will demand Haryana and Himachal next and Delhi another day.

Ask the wife and the mother of a martyred soldier who fought the war for Kashmir? Did they do it for money? Ask those Kashmiri Hindus who were an inseparable part of Kashmir’s being but were hounded out by Muslim Jihadis just because their women wore Bindis and men chanted Shiva mantras? Now give this Kashmir to the assaulters? A woman raped is being asked to go back to the rapists because they won’t live without her?

Now read this carefully.

“The state of Jammu and Kashmir has been and shall be an integral part of India and any attempts to separate it from the rest of the country will be resisted by all necessary means.

“India has the will and capacity to firmly counter all designs against its unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity and demands that Pakistan must vacate the areas of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir which they have occupied through aggression.”

The Indian Parliament passed this resolution unanimously on 22nd February 1994. Before presenting it in the house, the speaker said -’Each word and sentence of this resolution has been seriously considered by the government and the leaders of the opposition parties.’

Every party endorsed and passed this. Was that a facade?

Now every word of this resolution is sought to be turned into a joke, a meaningless exercise of some foolish people who pass resolutions just to pass time and earn their allowances.

Some of the Indian journalists and writers who earn name and fame and money for their being an Indian have chosen to advice to ‘liberate’ Kashmir and not to force Indian ‘colonialism’ on a people who do not want to be recognized as Indians. It sounds damn good if read in New York and Rome. But what about those who are Kashmiris and patriots and want to live with India? Who still have land and homes in the valley? And they are Muslims too. Who are the ‘people’ these worthies have recognized as those who do not want to live with India? Jihadis? Those blood thirsty anti Indians who have been fed on Pakistani money and propaganda to hate Hindus and India and burn tri-colours to make this region a Nizam-e Mustafa , only for the Muslims so that they can share the booty? Like they have been fighting over the question of leadership with each other presently? Mir Waizs and Geelanis and Butts and Muftis and Abdullah’s- not a single so-called Muslim leader of the valley, supporting separatism is at peace with another Muslim ‘brother in arms’. And now as NSA Narayanan has hinted the separatist leader’s murder during a march to Mujaffarabad was a result of an internal clash. But sitting in Delhi and enjoying suspicious hospitalities make some writers to write the junk against the very tricolor that defines their identity on this planet.

The timing and synchronizing of ‘Azadi to Kashmir’ views is significant. All of them belong to one family of hating anything done by the nationalist activists. The profligacy they have exercised is quite understandable in times like these when India is being ruled under a dispensation that favours western ideas and policies for domestic governance. Amarnath agitation has already taken an unprecedented shape, which they had never visualized. In such a situation, the suggestion to ‘liberate’ Kashmir has been put forward to demonize Hindus and strengthen the anti- national Islamist agitation in the valley, by those who wield a considerable influence in media and are not Muslims.

If ‘liberate’ Kashmir chorus is a spontaneous reaction to the demonstrations being held in the valley, why was the massive upsurge of the patriotic people in Jammu not considered at an equal weight and columns written to listen to the voice of India? Why the tricolor people of Jammu are discarded and ignored as a worthless opinion and all hearts go to listen to the foul cries of separatism? And the secularism of such voices gets quite evident when valley newspapers put on headline like these-’Geelani says- Islam and Pakistan central to Kashmir movement’ (Kashmir Times, 19th August, 2008).

Those who wont give an inch of their south Delhi -Gurgaon apartments to the neighbor are vexing eloquent to give away Kashmir to blood thirsty terrorists. What is the reason behind the separatism of the valley Muslims? Economic or religious? Economic reasons can be sorted out in a different manner, if they feel they have been deprived of opportunities and financial grants. Surely once in the planning commission’s board room, they would discover that the rest of India has genuinely taken less than what it gave to the valley.

Now after 1947, this has become another flashpoint of division just on the basis of religion. We are Muslims, we can’t live with a Hindu India, was the war cry of Jinnah’s hordes pre ‘47. It was followed by direct action, Calcutta killings, green flags and finally Gandhi, the Hindu Vaishnav yielded and said, ok, take Pakistan but let’s live in peace.

We compromised, our ahimsa was taken as cowardice and we got wars, immediately we had the land partitioned.

Now again, some wizards have tried to create an atmosphere to allow Kashmir’s secession for peace. Do they understand it won’t end at just Kashmir, but trigger off an avalanche of demands for separate nations from the east to south and later in the west too?

Accept NSCN’s demand to have a separate Nagalim ? And ULA’s Assam nation? Manipur wants a separate nation too as they claim they didn’t celebrate 15th August 1947 as their independence day. Should we tell them to shut up because till now no senior journalist has recommended their freedom? We have a dozen flashpoints waiting to secede and declare freedom. Tamil nation and a Maoist corridor joining Nepal’s Reds? There is a fantastic map on the internet declaring a Mugalistan , a complete green Muslim land beginning from Pakistan, including Kashmir and UP’s border areas, having already gobbled up Ladakh and Himachal and Uttarakhand and reaching till Assam. One would have just laughed it away if the present valley agitation hasn’t ignited treacherously innocent suggestions by writers whom you can’t ignore. It takes time to get bad things precipitate enough.

Assam is already in the grip of Bangladeshi Muslims. Whatever you say of secularism or rising above religious fault lines, the truth of the matter is Kashmir is a communal cauldron and so is Assam. It’s simply a Hindu Muslim issue, you can ignore only at the cost of national integration. They are fed on political expediencies. Like in Assam the IMDT act was helping foreign infiltrators yet government at the centre didn’t revoke it till Supreme Court ruled against it and in spite of that the act was re introduced from the back door.

In Kashmir the people were never allowed to feel as Indians by introducing a separate constitutional provision under article 370 so how can you expect them to behave as Indians?

Delhi’s media sultans feel sun will not rise without their approval. They can enjoy the fizz of their arrogance, but the sun rises on its own and maintains its temperature too. I am filing this column from Jammu where people are showing the Indian way of patriotism to the valley. Every street and road is empty unless there is a demonstration. Traders have shuttered down their shops continuously for more than a month. Small entrepreneurs, auto rickshaw drivers, labourers are all off the work. Schools have not opened since last three months as immediately at the fag end of summer vacations the Amarnath Movement began. Banks are closed, sms’s are prohibited, no public transport is available, it’s an unimaginable nightmare during any emergency. But who cares?

To feed the citizens city is having free meals (langars) organized at more than fifty points where at an average one lakh people take meals twice a day costing ten lakh rupees per day. Every house hold is giving donations to run such langars without complaint.

But strangely enough, the divide we see between valley and Jammu is reflected between media of Jammu and Delhi too. What Jammu’s mainline papers are reporting doesn’t get reflected in Delhi’s papers and channels who have become self appointed guardians of secularism and peace of their own variety and think if they suppress the factual position on Jammu, peace will be restored soon and communalism will not spread. So when the patriots agitate, its communalism and needs to be suppressed. But when Pakistani flags are hoisted atop Lal Chowk and tricolor burnt amidst chants of Allah O Akbar and Pakistan Paindabad, it has to be reported ‘objectively’ and with full focus so that the sentiments of separatists are not hurt or suppressed! Strange media ethics these seculars follow.

What son of Devaki won’t have tolerated is being allowed by his followers. Isn’t it the time to revive his spirit of Geeta and win a war of righteousness? The body alone perishes; the spirit remains immortal, so why fear O Arjuna?
Post script:

Jammu is feeling the heat of Delhi’s attitude to ignore its demands and term the entire movement as a political one. A Congress leader equated Jammu’s patriotic agitation with the Hurriyat, that demands secession. Home Ministry thinks it can use the Chinese method to fatigue the movement by procrastination and prolonging talks and make these people bend on their knees. This approach is further fueling the fire and will ultimately result in people using more violent methods to have their voice heard. The frustration and fierce angst is to be seen and believed, sitting in Delhi doesn’t give even an iota of the truth that’s Jammu today. A senior columnist in Jammu gave me a table of figures detailing how Jammu had been treated unfairly all these years and still people never agitated. So, why have we been dust binned? He asks - Just because we remained patriotic and peaceful? Suppose we demand a separate Jammu nation and hold a secessionist flag, won’t the entire media and government come to listen to us and accept our demands the way they appease valley’s Muslims-? This was a dangerous question posed to me by an agitated software engineer in Raghunath Pura.

Here are a couple of statistics that prove his point -

Sailesh Dhobal & Bhanu Pande.

Muslims spend more than Hindu peers–The Economic Times

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Economic_State_Hindu_Muslim_equal_in_income/articleshow/1858719.cms

NEW DELHI: Forget all half-baked opinions you may have heard on the economic state of religious communities in India. Truth be told, at the national level, Hindus and Muslims are closer than you thought as far as average household income, expenditure, savings and even ownership of select consumer goods go.

In fact, in rural India, the gap between the two communities’ narrows appreciably and even reverses in some cases in favour of Muslims. Not surprisingly, the Sikhs are the most prosperous lot in India, with highest household income, expenditure and ownership of cars, two-wheelers, TV sets and refrigerators. Christians and other smaller communities don’t lag too far behind either.

In the first ever exercise mapping the economic contours of different religious communities in India, ET presents an exclusive peek into the National Council of Applied Economic Research’s (NCAER) data analysis from its National Survey of Household Income and Expenditure (2004-05), which was led by senior fellow Rajesh Shukla.

The survey collected primary data from a sample of approximately 63,000 households out of preliminary listed sample of 4,40,000 households spread over 1,976 villages (250 districts) and 2,255 urban wards (342 towns) covering 64 National Sample Survey (NSS) regions in 24 states/UTs.

If you thought Muslims alone were steeped in poverty, read on. Hindus and Muslims, at a national level, run neck-and-neck on average annual household income (AHI) of Rs 61, 423 and Rs 58,420, respectively. Or, to put it differently, an average Hindu household has an income of Rs 168 per day, while an average Muslim household earns Rs 160 a day. In rural India, an average Hindu AHI is Rs 49,077 with Muslim close behind with AHI of Rs 47,805. On income parameters, at least, Hindus and Muslims are, indeed, bhai-bhai.

Marketers planning an ethnographic pitch to grab mindshare or policy makers preparing ground for affirmative action may do good to remember that an average Muslim household, at the national level, spends more than a Hindu one, with annual household routine expenditure (AHRE) at Rs 40,327 compared to Rs 40,009 for the latter.

Sikh household AHRE is highest at Rs 60,475 with Christians at Rs 45,291.In rural India, Muslim AHRE (Rs 33,711) is higher than Hindu (Rs 32,555) and compares well with Christian (Rs 38,068).

Interestingly, Muslims who are the bottom as far as income is concerned—top the list when AHRE is measured as a percentage of AHI. They spend over 69% of their income on routine household expenditure followed by Sikhs (66%) and Hindus (64%).

While the average national AHI for all religious groups at 2004-05 prices, stood at Rs 62,066, the patterns across specific groups reflect stark differential. The smaller religious communities (excluding Christians and Sikhs) taken as the whole are an affluent lot with AHI of over Rs 1 lakh. Sikhs and Christians leave larger communities way behind with AHI of Rs 91,153 and Rs 70,644 respectively.

And this has a clear impact on their expenditure and ownership patterns for a select consumer goods. Ownership patterns may tell their own story if the industry chooses to dig further. Penetration of cars is highest among Sikhs (17.3% households), followed by Christians (10.95%).

At the national level, Hindu and Muslim households virtually mirror each other on ownership of a host of products—cars ( 5.1% and 4.3%), two-wheeler (35.3% and 31.3%), refrigerator (17.9% and 15.9%) and radio (49.5% and 51.3%). Turn to rural India and Muslim households have an edge on not just AHRE, but even car ownership (2.6% versus 2.4% of Hindu households).

The only oddity in ownership between Hindus and Muslims is on television, with national penetration at 62.8 % and 54%, respectively. Even rural Muslim household lag here with penetration of just 39.1% compared to 52% for the majority community.

The East’s right to this millennia-old global mark of good fortune suffers from decades of abuse as the symbol of the Nazi Party and racial supremacy

By Jane Srivastava, South Carolina, USA

The swastika is as holy to the Hindus, Jains and Buddhists as it is evil to people from the West. When a symbol represents diametrically opposite concepts to different groups of people, a natural conflict arises. Asians who immigrate to the United States encounter obstacles when trying to incorporate the swastika into their religious ceremonies. Here in America, like in the rest of the Western world, the Hindus’ and Jains’ most cherished and holy symbol is viewed only as a legacy of the atrocities and murders committed under the Nazi black swastika. Many Americans do not know the history or the importance of the symbol to Hindus. The results of this ignorance are real. Hindu temples have been vandalized, religious ceremonies displaying swastikas interrupted and upright devotees accused of neo-Nazism. The swastika is such a ubiquitous symbol of goodness throughout the East that many less-educated Asians are themselves unaware that the swastika could signify any evil concept.

My great-grandparents were murdered by the Nazis. As a Jewish person raised in Europe, for most of my life I have associated the swastika with the Nazis and Nazi heritage–extermination of millions of people, destruction of countries and superior racist ideology. The sight of a swastika alone rouses such strong feelings in me that I naturally want to look away after a second or two. The pain I feel when looking at the swastika is as strong as if I had lived through the war myself.

When I first saw a swastika on an Indian greeting card, I was taken aback: “Why is this offensive Nazi symbol displayed on a wedding invitation?” I knew that the Nazis stole the symbol from the ancient cultures, particularly India. However, I had assumed that, after World War II, the evil associated with the symbol prevented the original cultures from using it.

As I am learning more about the Indian culture and religion, I am becoming more curious about the symbolism of the swastika and the present-day conflict surrounding it.

Swastika is a Sanskrit word, su meaning “good, ” asti meaning “to be ” and ka, a suffix. It is translated as “good being, ” “fortune, ” literally “it is well ” or “conducive to well-being.” For Hindus, the swastika is a symbol of auspiciousness, prosperity and good fortune. It also represents the sun and the cycle of life. In Loving Ganesha, Satguru Sivaya Subramaniyaswami, founder of Hinduism Today, explains the significance of the swastika to Hindus: “The swastika’s right-angled arms reflect the fact that the path toward our objectives is often not straight, but takes unexpected turns. They denote also the indirect way in which Divinity is reached–through intuition and not by intellect. Symbolically, the swastika’s cross is said to represent God and creation. The four bent arms stand for the four human aims, called purushartha: righteousness, dharma; wealth, artha; love, kama; and liberation, moksha. This is a potent emblem of Sanatana Dharma, the eternal truth. It also represents the world wheel, eternally changing around a fixed center, God. The swastika is regarded as a symbol of the muladhara chakra, the center of consciousness at the base of the spine, and in some yoga schools with the manipura chakra at the navel, the center of the microcosmic sun (Surya). Hindus use the swastika to mark the opening pages of account books, thresholds, doors and offerings. No ceremony or sacrifice is considered complete without it, for it is believed to have the power to ward off misfortune and negative forces.”

For the Jains, the swastika represents four types of birth which an embodied soul might attain. The swastika has been adopted as part of a single symbol to represent the Jain community. In the Buddhist tradition, the swastika symbolizes the feet or footprints of the Buddha. It is often used to mark the beginning of texts. Modern Tibetan Buddhists use it as a clothing decoration. In China and Japan, the swastika has been used to represent abundance, prosperity and long life.

Before the Nazis stole the swastika from the ancient world, various cultures throughout Asia, Europe and the Americas had been uniform in assigning some positive and favorable meaning to the symbol. For the most part, these peoples had used the swastika sign in their religious practices to symbolize life, the sun, good fortune and prosperity. In the decades before World War II, the swastika was used as a design motif and symbol of good fortune in the United States, appearing ubiquitously on such items as greeting cards, magazine covers, book jackets, posters, playing cards, poker chips, jewelry, fruit wrappers and business logos. Even the Boy Scouts issued a “Swastika Thanks Badge, ” to be given to anyone who had done a kindness to a scout. Before the Nazis, the swastika sign had never been used to represent an evil concept or racist ideology. After World War II, Western cultures no longer used the symbol as they had prior to the Third Reich. Most Europeans and Americans still perceive any swastika as a Nazi or neo-Nazi symbol, despite differences in its color and the direction in which it points.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the swastika became a common symbol of German nationalism, meant to represent a long Germanic/Aryan history. As well it became a symbol of many anti-Semitic organizations. Adolf Hitler adopted the swastika when the German National Socialist Party (Nazi Party) was formed in 1919-1920.

The Nazis regarded themselves a superior race. Based on information from Hitler’s pet archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna, Hitler believed and propagated the idea that Aryans (from arya, “superior being ” or “noble “) were a master race of Indo-Europeans living in Eurasia, Nordic in appearance and directly ancestral to the German people.

The Jews are understandably sensitive to the swastika. Anti-Semitism was central to the Nazi movement. In Mein Kampf, Hitler described the symbolic meaning of the Nazi flag: “In red we see the social idea of the movement, in the white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work, which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic.” As an ethnic group targeted for systematic elimination under the mark of the black slanted swastika, all Jewish people had been touched by the Holocaust. It is hard, therefore, for any Jew to see a sign of good fortune in a scrawled swastika on a door or wall.

Thus, a conflict arises between the significance that Hindus assign to the swastika and the treatment of the sign by most Westerners as a symbol of hatred inherited from the Nazis, intensified as so many people from India and Asia arrive to work or live in Europe and America. Those immigrants include simple, uneducated people from rural areas who do not know of the prevalent stigma of the swastika in the West. Just as Westerners are unaware of the positive history of this ancient symbol, many less educated Asians do not know that it could be anything but auspicious. Because of the difference in the meaning of the symbol for the two cultures, people from India who display the sign may lose their job, be ostracized or threatened, even become victims of hate crimes.

Often when something is written in the Western media about the possibility of bringing back the ancient symbol of the swastika notwithstanding its Nazi significance, such words as redemption or rehabilitation are used. Even Hindus and Jains use similar words in their appeal to “rehabilitate ” their sacred symbol. Some authors discussing the return of the swastika opine that once the swastika is used for evil purposes, it cannot be redeemed. “Certain symbols might easily exist ambiguously or with multiple meanings, but ultimately not the swastika. For what once exemplified good fortune now manifests malevolence. What was once innocent is forever guilty & As long as it embodies even an iota of evil, it will never again be redeemed, ” declared graphic design guru Steven Heller in his book The Swastika: Symbol Beyond Redemption?

To redeem something means to extricate from an undesirable state or make up for defects. To rehabilitate means to bring something back to its previous normal condition, to cure it. None of these words seems appropriate. There was nothing wrong with the swastika that we now need to make up for its defects or cure it. It got into the wrong hands which used it as a symbol for their hateful deeds and ideology in perhaps what was the world’s most effective, integrated propaganda campaign. Thus, more appropriate words to describe what needs to be done with the swastika’s image would be acceptance, education, reconciliation and harmonization. So how do we reconcile the importance of the swastika for Hindus, Buddhists and Jains with its negative legacy in the West? How can we reduce the conflict and promote acceptance?

Education is the only thing that might promote a better understanding between the Hindus living in the Western world and their new countrymen. It is important that in the United States there be more written and said about the meaning of the symbol to Asian cultures and religions. Such an education should start in schools where Hindu, Christian and Jewish kids are taught world religions. When discussing Hinduism, the swastika and its important place in Hinduism must be taught to children. Learning more about Asian cultures and religions will result in tolerance and respect for other cultures’ ways of life and their religious practices.

The swastika is not the only symbol whose original godly and favorable significance was used for evil purposes. Under the Christian cross, brutal crusades to convert masses to Christianity took place, during the Medieval Inquisition millions of heretics were burned in fires, and in the United States, black Americans were persecuted and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. However, the cross has not become a forever detested and condemned symbol.

Because of our differences in geography, culture and experience, people from different parts of the world will treat symbols differently. As an Eastern European immigrant, I don’t believe I can disassociate the swastika from the meaning I grew up with. But after learning about Hindu culture, I have become aware of the importance of the swastika to Hindus and now deeply respect the symbol’s significance and holiness. With knowledge and understanding, people from the Western world, while not forgetting their countries’ experiences, can embrace the swastika as an auspicious sign of the Asian world. As education and awareness replace prejudice, intolerance and narrow-mindedness, there is hope people will start to see the historical richness as well as the present-day significance of the swastika, and not just its Nazi past.

Jane Srivastava holds a bachelor’s degree from Vilnius State University, Lithuania, and a degree from the Albany Law School, Albany, New York.

http://sites.google.com/site/hindunew/colonial-loot

The first public looter of Hindusthan: East India Company

Nick Robins

Published 13 December 2004

NS Essay 1- Corporate greed, the ruination of traditional ways of life, share-price bubbles, western imperialism: all these modern complaints were made against the British East India Company in the 18th century. Nick Robins draws the lessons

In The Discovery of India, the final and perhaps most profound part of his “prison trilogy”, written in 1944 from Ahmednagar Fort, Jawaharlal Nehru described the effect of the East India Company on the country he would shortly rule. “The corruption, venality, nepotism, violence and greed of money of these early generations of British rule in India,” he wrote, “is something which passes comprehension.” It was, he added, “significant that one of the Hindustani words which has become part of the English language is ‘loot’”.

For most of the succeeding 60 years, the East India Company sank from view. No plaque marked the site where its headquarters had stood in the City of London for more than two centuries. It was regarded as something that could be consigned to the history books, its deeds to be squabbled over by academics and imperial romantics. But the onset of globalisation has revived interest in a company that could be seen as a pioneering force for world trade. Exhibitions at the British Library and the V&A, plus a string of popular histories, have sought to revive the reputation of the “Honourable East India Company”. Its founders are now hailed as swashbuckling adventurers, its operations praised for pioneering the birth of modern consumerism and its glamorous executives profiled as multicultural “white moguls”.

Yet the East India Company, romantic as it may seem, has more profound and disturbing lessons to teach us. Abuse of market power; corporate greed; judicial impunity; the “irrational exuberance” of the financial markets; and the destruction of traditional economies (in what could not, at one time, be called the poor or developing world): none of these is new. The most common complaints against late 20th- and early 21st-century capitalism were all foreshadowed in the story of the East India Company more than two centuries ago.

In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith used the East India Company as a case study to show how monopoly capitalism undermines both liberty and justice, and how the management of shareholder-controlled corporations invariably ends in “negligence, profusion and malversation”. Yet nothing of Smith’s scepticism of corporations, his criticism of their pursuit of monopoly and of their faulty system of governance, enters the speeches of today’s free-market advocates.

Smith’s vision of free trade entailed firm controls on corporate power. And, as did his own times, subsequent history shows how right he was. If it is to contribute to economic progress, the corporation’s market power has to be limited to allow real choice, and to prevent suppliers being squeezed and consumers gouged. Its political power also needs to be constrained, if it is not to rig the rules of regulation so that it enjoys unjustified public subsidy or protection. Internal and external checks and balances must curb the tendency of executives to become corporate emperors. And clear and enforceable systems of justice are necessary to hold the corporation to account for any damage to society and the environment. These are tough conditions, and have rarely been met, either in the age of the East India Company or in today’s era of globalisation.

Today, we can see the East India Company as the first “imperial corporation”, the very design of which drove it to market domination, speculative excess and the evasion of justice. Like the modern multinational, it was eager to avoid the mere interplay of supply and demand. It jealously guarded its chartered monopoly of imports from Asia. But it also wanted to control the sources of supply by breaking the power of local rulers in India and eliminating competition so that it could force down its purchase prices.

By controlling both ends of the chain, the company could buy cheap and sell dear. This meant organising coups against local rulers and placing puppets on the throne. By the middle of the 18th century, the company was deliberately breaching the terms of its commercial concessions in Bengal by trading in prohibited domestic goods and selling its duty-free passes to local merchants. Combining economic muscle with extensive bribery and the deployment of its small but effective private army, the company engineered a series of “revolutions” that gave it territorial as well as economic control.

After Robert Clive’s victory at the Battle of Palashi in 1757, the company literally looted Bengal’s treasury. It loaded the country’s gold and silver on to a fleet of more than a hundred boats and sent it downriver to Calcutta. In one stroke, Clive netted a cool £2.5m (more than £200m today) for the company, and £234,000 (£20m) for himself. Historical convention views Palashi as the first step in the creation of the British empire in India. It is perhaps better understood as the company’s most successful business deal.

It was the unrivalled quality and cheapness of textiles that had lured the East India Company to Bengal, and it would be Bengal’s weavers who felt the full force of the company’s new-found market power. Never rich, the weavers nevertheless had a better standard of living than their counterparts in 18th-century England. At a time when the British state was intervening on the side of the employer - for example, to set maximum levels for wages - India’s weavers were able to act collectively, aiding their ability to negotiate favourable prices. But the East India Company eliminated the weavers’ freedom to sell to other merchants, and so crushed their limited but important market autonomy. It imposed prices 40 per cent below the market rate, and enforced them with violence and imprisonment. Many weavers were driven to despair. One account reports that, among the winders of raw silk, “instances have been known of their cutting off their thumbs to prevent their being forced to wind silk”.

As the company transformed itself from a modest trading venture into a powerful corporate machine, so its systems of governance completely failed to cope with the new responsibilities that it faced. As Philip Francis, one of its leading critics, put it, in- stead of seeking “moderate but permanent profit”, the company had recklessly pursued “immediate and excessive returns”. Corruption assumed epidemic proportions and speculation overtook its shares, stoked up by insider trading led by Clive and other executives.

In the history of financial crises, the South Sea Bubble is often regarded as the only premodern crash worthy of note. But the East India Company also engineered its own stock-market boom, ending in a share-price slump that rocked the world. The company’s share price doubled in the decade following Palashi, stoked by ever more extraordinary acquisitions, such as the takeover of Bengal’s entire tax system in 1765. In London, the company’s management and shareholders fought for control of a money machine they believed would yield unlimited returns. A swarm of “bulls” and “bears” descended on the company’s shares, with shareholders voting for a doubling of the annual dividend from 6 to 12 per cent in order to cash in on the new-found wealth. This upward spiral of “infectious greed” - to use a phrase employed by Alan Greenspan, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, more than two centuries later - came to an end in May 1769 when news of renewed conflict in India reached the London markets. The share price fell 16 per cent in a single month, and would continue a downward course for the next 15 years, reaching the depths in July 1784 after a fall of 55 per cent.

Yet the human tragedy was just beginning. In Bengal, the annual monsoon rains had failed. But what turned a manageable natural disaster into a catastrophe was the manipulation of local grain markets by East India speculators, driving up the price of food beyond the reach of the poor. “As soon as the dryness of the season foretold the approaching dearness of rice,” went one eyewitness account, “our Gentlemen in the Company’s service were as early as possible in buying up all they could lay hold of.” The situation was compounded by the company’s decision to increase the rate of tax to ensure that revenue levels remained stable. Estimates vary, but up to ten million people may have died of starvation. When the full story became known in Britain, there was fury at the firm’s negligence. As Horace Walpole wrote at the time: “We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped - nay, what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of provisions by the servants of the East Indies.”

The company’s fortunes had now turned sharply downwards. By the end of 1772 it was, in effect, bankrupt. A final slump in its shares precipitated a Europe-wide financial crisis, and forced the company, begging for a bailout, into the arms of the government. But not only was the East India Company the mother of the modern multinational corporation, it also stimulated one of the first movements for corporate reform.

Well-versed in the history of the Roman Republic, Britain’s elite feared that, just as the proceeds of Rome’s conquest of Asia (western Anatolia) had been used to subvert its ancient freedoms, so the company’s takeover of Bengal would bring despotism back home. If left unchecked, argued one editorial, the company could “repeat the same cruelties in this island which have disgraced humanity and deluged with native and innocent blood the plains of India”. Prior to his conservative turn during the French revolution, Edmund Burke pressed repeatedly for the company to be made accountable to parliament and for its system of exploitation to be ended. “Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost for ever to India,” he concluded, a judgement that would probably be echoed today by millions of people working at the wrong end of the multinational bargain.

All the tools with which we are now familiar were deployed to tame the firm: codes of conduct for company executives, rules on shareholder abuse, government regulation, and ultimately, as with so many failed firms, nationalisation.

Government intervention over a hundred years transformed the company from a purely commercial institution to an agent of the British state. It was only in the wake of the great rebellion against company rule, which shook northern India in 1857-58, that its anachronistic position as a profit-making ruler was put to an end. Direct control of the company’s territories passed to the crown, and the British Raj was born.

Yet in spite of all the parliamentary inquiries and waves of regulation, few of the company’s executives were ever brought to book. Clive narrowly escaped parliamentary censure in 1773, only to die by his own hand. Parliament then turned its attention to Warren Hastings, governor-general of Bengal, voting twice to recall him for mismanagement. Both times this was rebuffed by the company’s shareholders and, as a last resort, and at Burke’s instigation, the medieval practice of impeachment was revived and used against him. Among the charges was that Hastings had introduced a company monopoly over the production of opium and, in an attempt to smuggle the crop into China, had awarded the contract at a knock-down price to the son of the East India Company chairman, who promptly sold it on for a tidy profit. Hastings was also the first to seek deliberately to break China’s ban on the importation of opium. His attempt failed, but would be pursued by his successors, with tragic consequences. Burke won Commons majorities in support of his case, and in February 1788, the trial of Hastings began in the Lords with Burke delivering a four-day opening speech against him.

What makes Burke’s challenge to Hastings and the East India Company so compelling are the principles on which it was based. “The laws of morality,” he declared, “are the same everywhere . . . there is no action which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa and the world over.” Against the relativism that increasingly viewed India as an inferior land in which different standards of justice should apply, Burke unfurled the standard of absolute values, protesting against “geographical morality”. In the heat of his reactions to the French revolution, Burke would oppose Tom Paine’s Rights of Man.But in the case against Hastings, Burke argued for companies to be judged by their respect for what we would understand as universal human rights. The trial was interrupted, first by George III’s madness and then by the French revolution. After eight long years, Hastings was acquitted of all charges, a result that surprised nobody, given the political complexion of the Lords.

Yet there is one instance where the company’s impunity was broken. In 1774, a group of Armenian merchants launched a civil case for damages against Hastings’s predecessor, Harry Verelst. Led by Gregore Cojamaul and Johannes Padre Rafael, the merchants alleged that Verelst had arbitrarily locked them up in Bengal six years earlier, confiscating their property and removing their freedom to trade. It is a testimony to the British legal system that in December 1774, the Lord Chief Justice decided in favour of the Armenians, judging that Verelst had been guilty of “oppression, false imprisonment and singular depredations”. Verelst had to pay £9,000 in damages, as well as full costs. Thousands of miles away from the scene of the crime, the principle of extra-territorial liability for corporate malpractice was established in 1770s London.

Many in business regard the current upsurge of global litigation against corporations such as Talisman, Unocal and Shell as somehow new and unjustified. Yet Verelst’s case provides a powerful precedent, demonstrating that more than 200 years ago, a senior executive of the world’s first multinational was tried and found guilty of what we would now consider human rights abuses.

It is not, however, Cojamaul’s statue that stands outside the Foreign Office in Whitehall, but Robert Clive’s. That such a rogue still has pride of place at the heart of government suggests that Britain has not yet confronted the connections between its corporate and imperial pasts. This is not mere forgetfulness, but the mark of a continued belief that the unrestrained pursuit of market power and personal reward is to be praised at the highest levels. In India, the East India Company’s mismanagement remains part of the national consciousness; here, knowledge of the company’s corruption and abuse is almost entirely lacking. We still do not recognise the “imperial gene” that remains at the heart of modern corporate design.

Perhaps Nehru can help us. In The Discovery of India, he examined the consequences of England’s long domination of India in terms of karma, the spiritual law of cause and effect. “Entangled in its meshes,” he wrote, “we have thus struggled in vain to rid ourselves of this past inheritance and start afresh on a different basis.” Independence was a necessary starting point for India, wrote Nehru, but Britain, too, needed to “start afresh”. As we approach the 250th anniversary of Palashi, we do not need further glorification of the East India Company’s contribution to consumerism or of the celebrity of its executives. We need an honest reckoning with the human costs of its quest for market domination.

Nick Robins’s Imperial Corporation: reckoning with the East India Company will be published next year.

http://www.newstatesman.com/200412130016.htm

Takshashila University (The world’s first university)

Takshashila University in ancient India is considered by some to have been the world’s first university dated to around 700 BCE. It was well known as an institution of higher learning in ancient India. Today, the ruins of the ancient city can be found at Taxila in the Punjab province of Pakistan about thirty kilometres northwest of Islamabad.

Situated in the fertile valley of the Jhelum and Sindhu rivers, it was a major town in the state of Gandhar, founded, according to references in the Ramayana, by King Bharata in the name of his son, Taksha. Records show that by 800 B.C., the university was functioning well. When Alexander’s armies came to the Punjab in the fourth century B.C., Takshashila had already developed a reputation as a seat of learning for Hinduism. Thus on his return Alexander took many scholars from there with him to Greece. Not only Indians but also students from as far as Babylonia, Greece, Syria, Arabia and China came to study. The minimum entrance age was 16 and there were 10,500 students. The panel of Masters included renowned names like Kautilya, Panini, Jivak and Vishnu Sharma.

It was at this university that Chanakya taught Chandragupta, who went on to found the Mauryan Empire. There were no financial, social or other barriers for entry to Takshashila. Students of all castes studied side by side. Takshashila provided education in a wide variety of of subjects,including Vedas, Language, Grammar, Commerce, Arts, Literature, Music, Dance, Philosophy, Religion (both Hindu and Buddhist) , Politics, Law, Chemistry, Biology, Medicine, Astronomy, Architecture, Sculpture, History and Geography. It provided instruction in vocational subjects like archery, elephant riding, agriculture, accounting and astrology. There were courses even on sorcery and witchcraft, handling snakes and dealing with omens. 68 different streams of knowledge were on the syllabus.

 Because of its international reputation, Takshshila used to host conferences in medicine and other fields that attracted scholars from Babylon, Syria, Arabia, Phoenicia, China and Persia. However, being near the north-west frontier of India, Takshashila had to face the brunt of attacks and invasions from the north and the west. Thus the Persians, Greeks, Parthians, Shakas and Kushanas laid their destructive marks on this institution. The final blow, however, came from the Huns who, A.D. c.450, razed the institution. When the Chinese traveller Huen T’sang (A.D. 603-64) visited Takshashila, the town had lost all its former grandeur and international character.