Myths about the Raj

To The Guardian

It is disingenuous of Shashi Tharoor to pretend that religious hatred did not exist in India before “the British introduced it” with their policy of “divide and rule”. He must know that when Mahmud of Ghazni brought Islam to the subcontinent in the tenth century, his invasion involved incalculable violence, massive loss of life and a destruction of Hindu religious sites on a scale that Isis could only dream of. The Mughals, who were Persian, were as foreign to India as the British.

Those British were, of course, lucky that a power vacuum had been created by the collapse of the Mughal empire in the second half of the 18th century, which the well-organised East India Company was better able to fill than even such a warlike Hindu warrior caste as the Marathas. As George Orwell pointed out long ago, the Raj was indeed a racket run for the greedy benefit of about 1% of the UK’S population (true of all capitalism since about 1980). Nevertheless, there were moments of civilisation and glory, both for the eventually defeated conquerors and those who bravely resisted them, throughout the very short period when the British were political players in India.

The twisting of historical facts and rising religious nationalism happening now in India and throughout Southeast Asia does not bode well for the future. Ralph Lloyd-jones, Nottingham