Author: Ashok B Sharma Posted: July 10, 2009 Source: anypursuit.com

The chair of the department of molecular biology in the University of Caen, France, Prof Gilles-Eric? Seralini shared with the mediapersons on Friday the findings from his latest path breaking research on the adverse impact of herbicides like glyphosate. Results from his research show that this popularly used herbicide is also a part of the package for herbicide tolerant GM crops like Roundup Ready Soybean. The inert ingredients of Roundup Ready Soybeans can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells. Such cases have already occurred in Argentina were Roundup Ready Soybeans are extensively grown.

Seralini’s papers have been published in two leading scientific research journals and one such paper has been referred in Scientific American. His findings are relevant, in the context, as the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) in India is in the process of approving several herbicide tolerant GM crops for field trials.

Another European geneticist, Prof Michael Antoniou , reader in the department of medical and molecular genetics in King’s College, London said : “The only responsible use of genetic engineering is in a contained clinical laboratory setup. The extreme complexity with which genomic regulation works has not been understood by the best of geneticists and it should be remembered that GMOs released in the environment cannot be recalled. Precautionary approach is the only way forward with this technology.”

Seralini and Antoniou are presently in India addressing conferences of health experts, environmentalists and agriculture scientists.

The new Indian minister of state for environment and forests, Jairam Ramesh after assuming his office had expressed apprehensions about health and environmental hazards of GM crops and assured to take necessary action before final approval for its commercial release.

Seralini, who is also directly associated with the France-based Committee for Independent Research and Information on Genetic Engineering (CRIIGEN), said : “99% of all GM crops are actually sponges of pesticides – they are either engineered to produce a pesticide or to tolerate a pesticide. This is the case with insect resistant crops like Bt cotton, Bt brinjal and herbicide tolerant crops like GM corn. Given such a technology, the adverse effect on human and animal health is often neglected by developer seed companies and regulatory authorities and this is unacceptable since we are dealing with an irreversible technology.”

He said that his findings based on the dossiers of Mahyco on biosafety of Bt brinjal showed that it was unsafe for human and animal consumption. His study noted, “The parameters affected in animals fed with Bt brinjal are in blood cells or chemistry, but in different manners according to the period of measurement during the study or sex. In goats, the prothrombin time is modified and biochemical parameters such as total bilirubin and alkaline phosphates are also changed, as well as feed consumption and weight gain. For rabbits, less consumption was noted and also prothrombin time modification, higher bilirubin in some instances, albumin, lactose dehydrogenase and the hepatic markers alanine and aspartate aminotransferases. Sodium levels were also modified, as well as glucose, platelet count, mean corpuscular haemoglobin concentration and haematocrit value. In cows, milk production and composition changed by 10%-14%.”

“Rats which were GM-fed had diarrhoea, had higher water consumption, suffered from decrease in liver weight as well as decrease in the relative liver to body weight ratio. Feed intake was modified in broiler chickens with glucose in some instances. Average feed conversion and efficiency ratios are changed in GM-fed fish. All that makes a very coherent picture of Bt brinjal to be potentially unsafe for human consumption. It will be also potentially unsafe to eat animals who have these problems. These differences are most often not reported in the summaries of different experiments, but are present in the raw data, ”the study added.

According to the study, these differences were, when discussed, disregarded often on the grounds that they were within the range of a wide “reference” group. The reference group represents a wide range of brinjal types and is not a strict comparison. Other reasons for disregarding the differences were that they did not show linear dose response or time response, or that they were only present in either males or females, but not both. Such declarations that the differences seen were not of biological relevance and unsubstantiated by the data presented from the feeding trials.

Clear and significant differences were seen to increase food safety concerns and warrant further investigation. Bt brinjal cannot be considered as safe as its non-GM counterpart, the study concluded.

Also look at: www.mynews.in for India against environment barriers in trade, by this same author.

Author: Ethan Huff Posted: June 11, 2009 Source: www.naturalnews.com

(NaturalNews) The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) has issued a warning urging the public to avoid genetically modified foods and has also called for a moratorium on GMOs until long-term, independent studies can prove their safety. The group has also called for required labeling of foods that contain GMOs, a move that has been strongly opposed by the Food and Drug Administration and Big Biotech which cooperatively purport that consumers should not have the right to know whether or not the foods they buy come from traditionally bred or genetically engineered sources.

While urging for more independent studies, the AAEM paper cites its own studies alleging that genetically modified foods cause serious adverse health effects, emphasizing more than a mere “causal association” as is commonly assumed. These effects include rapid aging, severe alterations to the major bodily organs, infertility, immune problems, gastrointestinal dysfunction, and disruption to proper insulin regulation, among others.

Many doctors are warning their patients to avoid GMOs as well, recognizing the distinct correlation between GMOs and disease. Ohio allergist Dr. John Boyles believes genetically engineered foods are so dangerous that people should never eat them. Biologist Pushpa M. Bhargava, following the review of more than 600 scientific journals, has concluded that the drastic deterioration of Americans’ health in recent years can be attributed to GMOs being introduced into their diets.

Experimental studies of genetically engineered foods and their effects in the body are disturbing, to say the least. Biologist David Schubert of the Salk Institute has stated that children are the most likely people to experience the adverse effects of GMOs, noting that apart from adequate safety studies, children become “the experimental animals”. In truth, every citizen is a guinea pig when genetically altered organisms are introduced into the food supply without adequate safety studies let alone honest labeling.

In the animal studies that have been conducted, some noteworthy findings have been discovered about GMOs:
Female rats fed genetically modified soy saw most of their babies die within three weeks compared to the 10% death rate experienced by rats fed natural soy. The babies that survived in the genetically modified-fed control group were also born smaller and had problems getting pregnant later on.
Male rats fed genetically modified soy experienced a change in testicular color from pink to dark blue, as well as altered young sperm and significant changes in their DNA.
Indian buffalo that consumed genetically modified cottonseed experienced various birthing complications including infertility, abortions, premature delivery, and prolapsed uteruses. Many of the calves that survived birth died shortly thereafter.
In the United States, about 24 farmers reported that their pigs became sterile after consuming genetically modified corn.
Genetically modified corn and cotton, purposely engineered to create their own built-in pesticide called Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), have been indicted in several studies to provoke intense allergic and immune reactions and death. Since the levels of Bt produced in the plant represent thousands of times more a concentration of Bt than natural Bt spray, the effects are greatly amplified. Shepherds whose sheep grazed on Bt cotton after harvest witnessed thousands of their sheep die. Post mortem examinations revealed severe irritation and black patches in the intestines and liver, as well as enlarged bile ducts. All sheep fed the Bt cotton eventually died within 30 days while those that grazed on natural cotton remained healthy.
Bt corn was also responsible for the deaths of cows, horses, water buffaloes, and chicken in both Germany and the Philippines.
Genetically modified tomatoes fed to rats were shown to cause bleeding stomachs and eventually killed many of the rats.

These are just a few examples of the many catastrophic effects of using genetically modified organisms as food.

Probably the worst finding in the AAEM report is the fact that GMOs can live and reproduce in the intestinal flora of the body long after being eaten. The genes present in the genetically modified organisms transfer into the DNA of intestinal bacteria, the good bacteria that digests food and maintains bodily health. This reprogramming can cause the intestinal flora to begin reproducing Bt pesticides, for example, rather than producing the living bacteria it is supposed to. The permanent, deadly implications of these alterations are mind boggling since intestinal flora is crucial for life.

Despite consensus from most FDA scientists in the early ’90s declaring that genetically modified foods are inherently dangerous and could lead to all sorts of serious health problems, politics won out as mandates were given from Washington to promote biotechnology and GMOs in spite of apparent and obvious dangers. This led to the promotion of Michael Taylor, former attorney for Monsanto, as head of GMO policy at the FDA, a move that led to the official denial by the agency of any knowledge or substantiated concern by any FDA scientists about the safety of GMOs.

Despite findings in some 44,000 pages of internal FDA memos and reports released in 1999 due to a lawsuit, findings that contained the warnings from then scientists about the “unintended negative side effects” of genetic engineering, official FDA GMO policy has been scrubbed clean of the truth and purports blatant lies in its defense of GMOs as safe. In fact, current policy emphatically states that no safety studies on GMOs are even required or necessary; it is instead up to Big Biotech to determine the safety of its own genetically modified organisms if it so chooses.

Many people may remember the deadly epidemic in the late 1980s from the genetically engineered version of L-tryptophan, a food supplement, that was introduced into the market. An estimated 10,000 people became permanently disabled and about 100 died. Yet despite the rapidly occurring, deadly effects from this particular GMO immediately following its release, including noticeable changes in the blood, it took over four years to identify the existence of this epidemic.

Many concerned doctors hypothesize that the disease-causing symptoms of GMOs being consumed today will take years to show up, further besetting the efforts of those who are trying to expose the dangers of GMOs. Current data is showing that since 1996 when genetically modified crops were first introduced, the incidences of people with three or more chronic diseases has jumped from 7 percent to 13 percent.

In addition to all the existing evidence, AAEM is urging its members, the scientific community, and those in medicine to continue gathering case studies and initiate epidemiological research to help determine, once and for all, the effects of GMOs on human beings in addition to their effects on animals.

It is wise to avoid foods that contain GMOs and ingredients that are genetically engineered. These include non-organic corn and soy derivatives, canola and cottonseed oils, and sugar from sugar beets. Ingredients such as corn starch, corn meal, and soy lecithin are great examples of common ingredients that are suspect. Unless labeled as non-GMO or explicitly organic, these common ingredients are most likely genetically modified and should be avoided at all costs.

Lastly, the mindful citizen should contact grocers, food manufacturers, and restaurants to inquire about genetically modified ingredients and oppose their usage. As increasing numbers of people begin to seek out this information across the food supply-chain and purposefully avoid products that contain GMOs, producers and retailers will phase them out in order to meet demand. This can be seen in the gradual elimination of toxins such as high fructose corn syrup from food as consumers learn about its effects and avoid products that contain it.

Call Congress and urge support for mandatory GMO labeling, perhaps even the elimination of GMOs entirely. Get creative. Tell friends and family about the dangers of GMOs, organize local campaigns, and pass out literature. The sooner people become aware of GMOs and the havoc they are causing, and demand their removal from food, the sooner GMOs will exist only in history books as one of the most detrimental scientific experiments ever perpetrated on mankind.

Sources:

Opposing Views, “Genetically Modified Foods Pose Huge Health Risk”

News With Views, “Obama’s team includes dangerous biotech ‘Yes Men’”

The Times of India - GM food? It’s poison

Institute for Responsible Technology

Posted Feb 20, 2009 Source: http://www.goldenrice.org (pdf document)

To the editor of the Daily Mail (London)
Dear Editor,
On February 16th you published an article that claimed that studies being conducted with Chinese children by the inventors of Golden Rice in collaboration with the Chinese government are unethical. The article claimed these studies violated the Nuremberg Code that was developed after World War II to protect us from unethical human experimentation. We the undersigned find the article in serious deviation from the facts in a number of important ways. The story originates from dedicated anti-GM campaigners who will stop at nothing to block the adoption of GM crops. It is morally reprehensible that they are willing to allow millions of humans to die or endure avoidable blindness because of Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) in order to achieve their goal of a GM free world.
We would offer the following observations.
1. VAD kills 1-2 million people a year. Put in perspective, that is equivalent to two 9-11 attacks a day, or the same as the losses from the tragic December 2004 Tsunami every month. Since the development of Golden Rice, deaths from VAD have amounted to over 15 million (http://www.gmobelus.com)– a number that exceeds the dimensions of the Holocaust. The staggering impact of VAD has occurred in spite of massive vitamin supplementation programs –programs that are necessary and that have no doubt helped but they have for many reasons been unable to stem the tide of VAD.
2. Golden Rice contains beta-carotene that then is converted to Vitamin A in the body. The studies in question were being performed to determine how efficiently Golden Rice can reduce VAD mortality and improve human health. Children were selected for the study since they are the most vulnerable to the effects of VAD and suffer lifelong consequences. Children are in fact the target population of the humanitarian project for which Golden Rice is being developed. The studies were conducted according to the highest ethical standards. Protocols were approved by institutional review boards in the USA and China. They are in full compliance with NIH and Chinese government guidelines and the Nuremberg Code. All subjects benefited because they were given Golden Rice, or Vitamin A or spinach (which also provides beta-carotene) as positive controls.
3. The experiments were no more dangerous than feeding the children a small carrot since the levels of beta-carotene and related compounds in Golden Rice are similar. Contrary to the assertions published in the Daily Mail, beta-carotene itself is safe to consume at levels far in excess of those present in Golden Rice. The objections to these studies make as much scientific sense as objecting to giving the children a vitamin pill.
4. Were many lives not at stake here, we would find it more than mildly amusing that the very groups who complained in the past that GM foods were placed on the market without any studies in humans now protest with mock moral outrage when a study is conducted in humans. In this case it is necessary to demonstrate that Golden Rice supplies Vitamin A in humans.
5. The morally obscene antics in opposition to Golden Rice arise from a blind opposition to GM crops that fails to acknowledge the overwhelming scientific consensus that they are safe and efficacious—they ignore a substantial body of scientific literature and more than 12 years successful planting of these crops on over 1 billion hectares around the globe with no adverse affects on humans or the environment. The best available evidence supports the conclusion that GM crops are as safe as, or are safer than conventional and organic crops. To not deploy Golden Rice ignores the ‘moral imperative’ to use the technology to the benefit of the poor (Nuffield Foundation for Bioethics, 2004). All of this seems to have fallen on deaf ears and moral blind spots of Anti-GM groups.
At a time of increasing poverty globally, and reduced food security generally, all possible technologies capable of improving the quantity and quality of food should be embraced. All the scientific academies of the world, and many other authorities globally, have found no health or environmental problems associated with genetically modified crops.
Yours faithfully,
Professor C.J.Leaver CBE, FRS,FRSE
Professor Jonathan Jones FRS
Professor Donald Grierson FRS
Professor C.J.Lamb FRS
Professor M.Gale FRS
Professor A.J Trewavas FRS,FRSE
and
Lord Dick Taverne

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.

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