Two or three decades ago, American multinationals made it a practice to appoint British executives to run their Indian subsidiaries. American executives didn’t know better. The only thing they knew about India was that British used to rule there. The British executives for the most part came in to India laden with their own colonial baggage. That was a pretty pathetic setup.
Today, India is much more important to America. Most major American companies have Indian CEOs running their Indian operations. Both Bush & Obama Administrations made India a priority both for business and geo-strategy. So you would think choosing vain colonial British people to run Indian operations must be passe by now. Not really and not in the arrogant, self-satisfied sphere of Journalism .
We speak of the selection by the Wall Street Journal (“WSJ”) of Paul Beckett as their New Delhi Bureau Chief. We speak about this selection today because of Mr. Beckett’s abominable article on August 27 in WSJ India Real Time. This article titled Osamu Suzuki’s War Crimes Moment demonstrates how Beckett puts his British feelings above his responsibilities as a India-based reporter writing about Indian issues in India Real Time. That in itself is journalistic misconduct. But Beckett went much farther. He used his British mindset to condemn a piece of history deeply important to both India and Japan.
1. India & Japan – Historical debts of gratitude & modern friendship
The vast majority of Indians think of Japan as a friend. It was Japan who helped India’s freedom struggle against British rule. Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, the great Indian leader, created a Free India Army from Indian soldiers captured from defeated British armies in the Far East. With Japanese assistance, the Free India Army fought British forces all the way from the Far east across China, through Burma into today’s northeastern India. Despite its defeat, the saga of the Free India Army made the British-led Indian Army reconsider its loyalty to the British Raj. And Britain could not rule India without the loyalty of the Indian Army. So the British made a deal with Mahatma Gandhi’s Congress and left India.
The Free India Army could not have been possible without Japan’s help. This is why most Indians have a sense of a historical debt to Japan. From what we have read, Japan feels a sense of gratitude towards India as the founding society of Buddhism. Japan is the main donor in the billion dollar Asian plan to revive Nalanda University, the ancient university renowned around the then world for Buddhist scholarship.
(monument to Justice Radhabinod Pal in Japan – src NYT)
Japan also feels a sense of deep gratitude to Justice Radhabinod Pal, an Indian judge who served on the Judiciary panel of post WWII Tokyo trials. Justice Pal was the only Asian judge in the otherwise Anglo judiciary panel and the only dissenter of the War Crimes verdict of that panel. His act and his memory is still revered in Japan. An article by Norimitsu Onishi in the New York Times reveals the depth of Japanese feelings towards Justice Pal:
- In recent weeks alone, NHK, the public broadcaster, devoted 55 minutes of prime time to his life, and a scholar came out with a 309-page book exploring his thinking and its impact on Japan. Capping it all, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, during a visit to India last week, paid tribute to him in a speech to the Indian Parliament in New Delhi and then traveled to Calcutta to meet the judge’s 81-year-old son.
Given this background, isn’t it natural for Maruti Chairman Osamu Suzuki to express his gratitude to Justice Paul as his own personal remembrance?
2. Paul Beckett’s comments about Mr. Suzuki’s statements
It seems Paul Beckett was provoked by what Mr. Suzuki said. And so he used his position as the WSJ Delhi Bureau chief to vent his own feelings. In fact, he devoted his entire article to his rage:
- “So it was bizarre, to say the least, for Mr. Suzuki instead to dwell on a footnote to the history of the Second World War as evidence of how fondly Japan feels toward India.”
- “It was a case, rare in the age of media-trained executives and bland corporate speak, where you got the feeling a company’s chairman was giving an insight into his deeper, personal opinions. And, if there was one takeaway from the incident for the Maruti Suzuki press department, it might be that the next time the elderly Mr. Suzuki starts ruminating about Japan’s defeat by the Allies almost 70 years ago, the translator should be instructed to cough loudly and translate whatever he says as: “I like India. Did I say I like India? I’ll say it again: I like India – a LOT.””
- “Instead, he suggested that, “as all of you must be aware, Dr. Pal did not hold guilty war prisoners of Japan,” or at least that was how it was translated. Dr. Pal, he went on, insisted on this stance because one of the fundamentals of a democracy is “to abide by the law.” He then added, as if surprising himself, that “just now I recall this incident.” (An addendum to that note to the Maruti press department: next time, give Mr. Suzuki a script and ask him not to deviate from it.)”
We disagree. Our note to Maruti press department would suggest making Japan’s help to the Free India Army as the focus of the Japanese investment in Maruti and to highlight the brave, principled stance of Justice Radhabinod Pal.
Paul Beckett was not content to stay within the Asian sphere. In his last paragraph, he invoked the Nuremberg trials against Nazi Germany.
- “It is inconceivable that the head of a German carmaker would try to make a positive connection of any sort by invoking the Nuremberg trials, and especially not by sounding sympathetic to the accused. It’s something Mr. Suzuki might want to think about as he goes about his business in India this week.”
Let us be clear. We understand why a British guy would take offense about the statements by a Japanese CEO about war crimes. We would have no problem with Mr. Beckett’s article had it been published in the British or American editions of t
he Wall Street Journal. The Japanese did commit war crimes against American and British troops. His article could possibly have been okay in WSJ India Real Time had it been published as a personal opinion of a British man.
But we are disgusted at Beckett’s usurping the forum of WSJ India Real Time to express a personal British view under the guise of writing about Indian perspectives. And we are appalled that British Paul Beckett dared to claim high moral ground for doing so.
Because, the crimes of Japan pale into insignificance when compared to war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the British in India.
3. British Crimes in India
How heinous, how evil was Britain’s behavior in India? It The best tell is that it served as inspiration to Adolf Hitler, before he began his own decade of crimes:
- Racial superiority entitled the British to the possession of India, Hitler informed a student body in Munich.….”The Nordic race has a right to rule the world and we must take this racial right as the guiding star of our foreign policy” he said in 1930 – page 33*
- Hitler laid out a blueprint for the economic regeneration of Germany that drew on the British Empire as a prototype. White men, he stated in a 1932 address….., had exercised their “extraordinary brutal right to dominate others” in order to reorganize the economy of lesser peoples, in India and in the Americas – thereby procuring their own prosperity. The English, in particular, had achieved a “wonderful marriage of economic conquest with political domination” – page 33*
- Because Germany would deploy divide and rule to retain control, only a selected officers would be needed to administer the vast new territory. “The Russian space is our India.” Hitler elaborated. “Like the English, we shall rule this empire with a handful of men.”8 – page 34*
What about specific war crimes? The list is numerous and two centuries long. Just a couple of well known crimes below:
- 1857 War of Independence – The British victory in this long war was followed by war crimes that are beyond description and perhaps exceeded only by Nazi actions.
- “All the city’s people found within the walls of the city of Delhi when our troops entered were bayoneted on the spot, and the number was considerable, as you may suppose, when I tell you that in some houses forty and fifty people were hiding. These were not mutineers but residents of the city, who trusted to our well-known mild rule for pardon. I am glad to say they were disappointed…“
- “Edward Vibart, a 19-year-old officer, recorded his experience – It was literally murder… I have seen many bloody and awful sights lately but such a one as I witnessed yesterday I pray I never see again. The women were all spared but their screams on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful… Heaven knows I feel no pity, but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very eyes, hard must be that man’s heart I think who can look on with indifference…”
- The British army went from town to town hanging and killing men regardless of age, regardless of whether they had any part in the war. It was deemed as retribution on behalf of muscular Christianity of Britain.The behavior of the British “Army of Retribution” were considered largely appropriate and justified in a Britain.
- The Jalianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 – “On Sunday 13 April 1919, [British General] Dyer was convinced of a major insurrection and
thus he banned all meetings. On hearing that a meeting of 15,000 to
20,000 people including women, senior citizens and children had
assembled at Jallianwala Bagh, Dyer went with fifty riflemen to a raised
bank and ordered them to shoot at the crowd. Dyer kept the firing up
till the ammunition supply was almost exhausted for about ten minutes
with approximately 1,650 rounds fired.”
(British concept of 1857 Justice – from Punch) (Plaque at Jallianwala Bagh)
These were not merely war crimes. They were committed and justified on the grounds of racial supremacy that were formulated by people like James Mill, Thomas Macaulay and Rudyard Kipling, all considered to be among finest intellectuals in British history:
- (scholar James) Mill had declared that “the Hindu, like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of a slave,”37 – page xxiv*
- (Rudyard Kipling) – It was the Bengali male’s “extraordinary effeminacy”, as evinced by his diminutive physique, his flowing clothes, and his worship of goddesses, that best illustrated why he, and by extension India, had to be guided by the firm, benevolent hand of a supremely masculine race.”37 – page xxiv*
- “All those arts which are the natural defence of the weak are more familiar to this subtle race than to…the Jew of the dark ages,” Macaulay had written of the Bengali, who compressed into his diminutive form every loathsome aspect of the Hindu.41 – page 235*
And what about Winston Churchill, that venerable British Lion?
- Churchill exclaimed, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” – page 78*
- “Winston may be right in saying that the starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks…” – Amery on Churchill – page 196*
- Back in London, Churchill told his private secretary that “Hindus were a foul race protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due.” (Pullulation means rapid breeding.) – pages 246-247*
- Churchill had corroborated….writing of an 1898 Indian plague:” a philosopher may watch unmoved the destruction of some of the superfluous millions, whose life must of necessity be destitute of pleasure.36 – page 204*.
A man who may watched unmoved the destruction of some of the superfluous millions of human beings! Can you get any closer to Adolf Hitler? And this is Churchill, a man WSJ’s Paul Beckett presumably respects and is proud of.
With this history of British crimes in India and with Japan’s help to India in securing independence from the British, what newspaper in India would stoop to complain about Osamu Suzuki’s words of gratitude to India’s Justice Pal?
A British-run Wall Street Journal India Real Time, that’s who.
4. Paul Beckett, America’s Asia Initiatives & WSJ Management
Mr. Beckett may not understand that America has begun its pivot to Asia. Japan is a fulcrum of America’s Asian pivot. And America’s relationship with India has been hailed by Secretary Clinton as “a strategic, indispensable partnership“. America is also trying to get India and Japan to get closer diplomatically, strategically and militarily.
America may be close to Britain and America may be the successor state to the British empire but thanks to President Roosevelt, America is untainted by any colonial baggage of Britain:
- On March 11, 1942, Roosevelt had written to the prime minister, likening the Indian predicament to that of the thirteen American colonies facing the War of Independence. The colonies had joined to form a stopgap government in order to fight the British, he pointed out…..Roosevelt asked Churchill to similarly allow a temporary government, headed by the representatives of the various political groups, to be set up in India. – page 67*
America’s relationship with India is enhanced by the superb track record of American corporations. The examples of all-American companies like Citibank, Pepsico selecting Indian-Americans as CEOs demonstrate American respect for Indian talent. Unfortunately, America’s Media companies tend to damage this American image. They prove continuously that they are hopelessly insular, almost entirely Anglo-European in their outlook.
The Wall Street Journal is an all-American brand, one that speaks for American capitalism. This all-American Wall Street Journal appointed a British Paul Beckett, a man who demonstrates a colonial, condescending attitude towards Indian history, to head its New Delhi bureau. What message does that send to India and to the global Indian disapora? What message does the WSJ management send when its editors allow publication of such abominably British-biased article in its Indian edition?
The message is simple and stark. It says that the WSJ management is either utterly tone deaf to the difference between Indian and British outlooks, or it is arrogantly insular if not outright racist.
5. What about Indian Writers at WSJ India Real Time?
This is probably the saddest aspect of the Beckett article. WSJ India Real Time has several Indian writers. We suspect not even one of them spoke up against Beckett’s colonial British bias. Is that because they were afraid of retribution from WSJ management or is that because they just don’t have the spirit? We don’t know but we suspect it is a combination of the two.
This reminds us of the words of Greg Chappell, ex-captain of the Australian cricket team and ex-coach of the Indian cricket team:
- “The cul
ture of India is such that, if you put your head above the parapet someone will shoot it. Knock your head off. So they learn to keep their head down and not take responsibility…” - “The Poms (British) taught them really well to keep their head down. For if someone was deemed to be responsible, they’d get punished. So the Indians have learned to avoid responsibility….”
The above attitude is not just restricted to Indian cricket team. It also seems embedded in the psyche of Indian writers at WSJ India Real Time. They certainly seem to have kept their heads down before British Paul Beckett.
6. Request for Response
The above is our opinion based on Paul Beckett’s article in the Wall Street Journal India Real Time titled Osamu Suzuki’s War Crimes Moment. Our approach is to share our reasoning with our readers and invite feedback. We do not wish to be unfair and we realize that others, especially the subjects of our articles, might see it differently.
So we invite Mr. Paul Beckett, the WSJ Management as well as other Indian writers at WSJ India Real Time to tell us if and where they disagree. Any response received for public dissemination will be printed verbatim.
* Note: the page number references in this article from the extensively researched book Churchill’s Secret War by Dr. Madhusree Mukherjee
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