British cruelty in India

SIR – Zareer Masani (“Why is Britain so ready to feel postcolonial guilt?”, Comment, April 23) dismisses me as a “polemicist”, but my book Inglorious

Empire relies on extensive evidence. On the Bengal famine, my book shows why and how Winston Churchill and his odious Paymaster-General Lord Cherwell – rather than “Hindu grain merchants” – were responsible for 4.3 million deaths.

Churchill damns himself out of his own mouth often enough, as I have cited him, and Indians were not his only targets – look, for example, at his advocacy in 1919 of the use of poison gas against the “uncivilised tribes” of Mesopotamia.

On textile exports, my book’s claims are well documented. Dr Masani glosses over the destruction of the looms and the recorded depopulation of Murshidabad and Dhaka, and avoids facing up to the imposition of export duties on Indian textiles while lifting tariffs on British cloth imports. The British held down a captive market by force of arms and unfair terms of trade. Indians had the resources to import modern machinery, but they were only permitted to do so a century after the British began their destruction of the existing industry in India.

British “investment” in India’s railways was a scam, with guaranteed rates of interest, paid for by Indian taxpayers, which were twice the prevailing rates on other secure investments. Instead of being grateful to the British who invested for their own profits, Indians asked why costs had spiralled to make one mile of Indian railway nine times more expensive than the equivalent anywhere else – the answer being that, since returns paid for by Indians were guaranteed to the “investors”, there was no reason to exercise any controls. Dr Shashi Tharoor New Delhi, India