The imperial chromosome

In 18th century India, as in 21st century Iraq, small foreign forces, highly trained and under superior generalship, succeeded in routing larger but ill-equipped and undisciplined native forces. Clive’s small army, for example, marched through the Tamil countryside and captured and held the Arcot fort, much as the “coalition” forces marched all the way to Baghdad from the Kuwait border.

However well-equipped and well-trained, though, any imperialist force is faced with one nagging question: why are we killing people in a land so far away from ours, people who have, in the end, done nothing to us?

One can imagine the superior levels of motivation that would be needed to travel and fight — to stay the course in an unfamiliar, frequently hostile terrain. In the 18th century, poverty and want led many English conscripts to the army in India.

Robert Clive himself came from humble origins. Hearing the roll call of the dead in the current war, one notices an inordinate number of Hispanic names. But alleviation of hunger can be done through other means — for imperialism to succeed, a moral imperative needs to be manufactured. The underlying motivations of financial gain must be cloaked, even from oneself, by investing the enterprise with high purpose: we are there to do good.

It is here that demonisation becomes essential. Saddam is a monster, we are here to liberate the Iraqi people. If innocents, children and animals included, get maimed and murdered, that is unfortunate collateral damage. As the English say, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

The British imperialists in India had salves more in tune with their century — to them all Indians were ’eathens (heathens) to be saved, and their rulers tyrants, profligates and debauches. British rule would be an improvement.

In a great many cases, in 18th century India as in 21st century Iraq, this bankruptcy of native rule was entirely true. The British perhaps did offer a more organised administration which large parts of native India just did not. Of all the leaders of the 1857 war of independence, it would be hard to name one who was a democrat to any degree, had open courts, appeals, due process and the like. Rani Laxmibai of Jhansi? Bahadur Shah Zafar? Hardly.

Indeed, good governance was a central theme of British imperialism in India. Throughout the British rule of India, not one governor-general or viceroy ever said that the British were here to stay.

Instead they maintained, “As soon as you are ready to govern yourselves, we will pack our bags and go.” It took them a good 190 years (and a Gandhi) to do so. Paul Wolfowitz could have been one of them. He echoed almost exactly those words when he hit the talk show circuit in the closing days of the bid for Baghdad, airing his thoughts on the administration of Iraq after the war.

When irony is so pervasive, one scarcely notices it. It was, after all, rather rich for Britain, on whose empire the sun never set, to condemn Iraq for conquering Kuwait. Or when the US and Britain bypassed the UN in their eagerness to interpret and “implement” the UN resolution 1441. But Blair really outdid himself when he declared in the House of Commons recently, “I would like to emphasise to the House and the wider Arab and Muslim world — we are doing everything we can to protect those holy sites and shrines.”

One was reminded of a story by a great Bengali author, a master of showing up hypocrisy, who makes his high-caste heroine boast of her impeccable adherence to rules of caste etiquette — that not once during her long affair had she ever allowed her lower-caste paramour to set foot in her kitchen.Is one to laugh or cry?