The United States is the wealthiest nation in the world with 22.4% share of Global GDP or gross domestic production. In contrast, India’s share is a measly 2.5%. How tables have turned? Back in early 18th century*, India’s share of global GDP was 24.4% while Britain’s share was a measly 2.8% including America which was then a colony of Britain.
Today’s impoverished Bengal was then the richest province in the world. The “balance of trade against all nations was in favor of Bengal” wrote Alexander Dow in his 1773 History of Hindostan*. But all that was before the 1757 “business deal” that made the British East India company the power in Bengal. Within a decade of that “battle” or “deal”, “Bengal lost two-thirds of its revenues to this commercial [British] plunder“, wrote British fund manager Nick Robins in his excellent book about the British East India Company.
The British occupation of India, factually speaking, has to rank as the worst evil in the history of humanity. India was so systematically and rapaciously plundered by the British that its GDP fell from 24.4% of the world* in early 18th century to about 0.5% in 1947. The world’s best weaving industry in Bengal was destroyed by forcing weavers to amputate their hands* and India was made to import fabrics from Lancashire. The crimes against the Indian people were so horrifically & racially genocidal that they put Hitler’s Germany to shame – millions of people killed & murdered wantonly simply because they were deemed to be an inferior race that only deserved to live as slaves of the British Empire. The best way to experience this evil today is to read the words of Mills, Macaulay, Kipling, Churchill and Churchill’s favorite “dog” Lord Churwell.
With this history, it is easy to see why the British media continue to see themselves as “masters” of India’s mind if not of India’s body. And India’s “english-educated” Indians continue to look up to the British media for thought leadership and lap up everything dished out by the Economist.
So you can see why the Financial Times of London has been comfortably biased against core Indians as others like the Economist. This FT bias was most visible in flagrantly prejudiced articles like Joe Leahy’s in 2009 and in the travel section in 2010. Recently we have seen a change in the FT. This change was visible in an article about religious violence in January 2014 and in a political article last month about the Generational Shift in India.
But then the Financial Times is mainly a paper about financial markets. And you cannot cover financial markets without imbibing a certain results-oriented discipline. The financial markets are brutally frank in determining which view is right or wrong. And that frankness eventually rubs off on financial publications.
May be that is why we saw an article in the Financial Times that we just won’t ever see in the New York Times. This week Gideon Rachman, a well known FT columnist, wrote a surprisingly sensible article titled India needs a jolt – and Modi is a risk worth taking. Yes, the title still has a colonial “master” type swagger – the British “right” to determine what is good for India and what isn’t. But read what Rachman wrote in the body of his article:
- “… here is something thrilling about the rise of Narendra Modi. Indian politics has been dominated by the Gandhi dynasty since independence. … By contrast, Mr Modi, prime ministerial candidate of the Bharatiya Janata party, comes from humble origins in small-town India. As a teenager he ran a tea stall at the local bus terminal. His rise would send an invigorating message across a country where too many people’s chances are still blighted by poverty, class or caste.”
- “That anti-dynastic message deserves to resonate well beyond India. The upper echelon of China’s government is still dominated by “princelings” – men such as President Xi Jinping who are descended from Mao Zedong’s close comrades. … South Korea and Japan are led by the daughter and the grandson of former heads of government. Politics is also strongly dynastic in India’s neighbours Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Myanmar. It would be a welcome change for India to elect a self-made man.”
- “Mr Modi emphasises economic policies that are focused on encouraging growth, helping business and reducing the size of government. This kind of liberal agenda is no longer so fashionable in the west. But it has been crowned with economic and political success in Gujarat.
- “India needs a jolt and Mr Modi looks like the man to provide it.“
What you see in Rachman’s article is the discipline & message of financial markets and their focus in what works vs. what doesn’t. This is also the reason why the world’s most successful financial institutions have been upgrading India because of Mr. Modi while the generic dispensers of colonial crap have been stuck in the anti-Modi mud.
This is why Gideon Rachman of the FT prefers Narendra Modi while the Economist wants the rule of a White European Christian woman over 1.2 billion brown & overwhelmingly non-Christian Indians. And this is why David Rennie of the Economist spoke thus of Mr. Modi on the McCaughlin Group on April 11, 2014:
- “You know, the whole world, not just America, doesn’t want this kind of dangerous provocateur in that kind of job.”
That is the difference between a market-focused columnist like Gideon Rachman of the FT and a smugly supercilious colonial-minded editor like David Rennie of the Economist.
* The Plunder of Bengal – a review of The Corporation That Changed the World by Nick Robins
** Hitler & Churchill – a review of Churchill’s Secret War by Madhusree Mukerjee
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