Dr Shashi Tharoor MP - Britain Does Owe Reparations

[he-man]

Nice,,i do not agree with him fully but nonetheless nice speech

 

[Providence]

what ? They are already some 5 identical threads running

 

[Steve781]

"Dr" Shashi Tharoor should have some dignity instead of looking to other countries for handouts.

 

[Chanakya's_Chant]

"Dr" Shashi Tharoor should have some dignity instead of looking to other countries for handouts.

Kindly watch the video before commenting - by the term "reparations" the MP meant a "moral debt" that needs to be paid and not any sort of monetary reparations or handouts as you say.

While Tharoor conceded that perhaps today's Britons are not responsible for some of these reparations, he said there was a "moral debt" that needs to be paid.

Alleging that many of today's problems in colonised countries — "including the persistence and in some cases the creation of racial, ethnic, and religious tensions were the direct result of the colonial experience" — he said many countries had indeed paid reparations. Germany had paid Israel and Poland, Italy paid Libya, Japan paid Korea, he said, adding that indeed Britain had also paid, to New Zealand's Māoris, since the 1970s.

"So this is not something that is unprecedented or unheard of that is somehow going to open some nasty Pandora's box," he said.

Denying that such reparations were to empower anybody, he said that Britain should use it as a tool to "atone for the wrongs that have been done." He urged Britons to accept they had to pay reparation "on principle".

"As far as I'm concerned, the ability to acknowledge a wrong that has been done, to simply say sorry will go a far long way than some percentage of GDP in form of aid,"..."What is required, it seems to me, is accepting the principle that reparations are owed." - this is what he said at the debate on the motion "This house believes Britain owes reparations to her former colonies " at Oxford Union.

 

[manlion]

******** must thank Britain without the British there wont be "India", Tamilnadu/Kashmir/Khalistan, Manipur etc wouldn't have been occupied by (H)Indians today . ..

 

[Abotani]

Indians frankly have no right to complain and lecture on colonialism and morality-to anyone.
They themselves are colonialists of the worst kind with hypocrisy to boot,occupying the land of others.Indians have probably done more heinous deeds(concentration camps,organised mass rapes,torture and attempted genocide of natives,demographic conquest) in it's short 7 decades than Britain did in it's entire stay in the subcontinent.

To even hint that the present generation of Britons should shoulder any blame for what happened generations ago while conveniently doing much worse to weaker sections of people in the lands it occupies is intellectual bankruptcy and brazen hypocrisy at it's zenith.

 

[my2cents]

Indians frankly have no right to complain and lecture on colonialism and morality-to anyone.
They themselves are colonialists of the worst kind with hypocrisy to boot,occupying the land of others.Indians have probably done more heinous deeds(concentration camps,organised mass rapes,torture and attempted genocide of natives,demographic conquest) in it's short 7 decades than Britain did in it's entire stay in the subcontinent.

To even hint that the present generation of Britons should shoulder any blame for what happened generations ago while conveniently doing much worse to weaker sections of people in the lands it occupies is intellectual bankruptcy and brazen hypocrisy at it's zenith.

What the heck are you talking about?? Please elaborate....

 

[Beidou2020]

India should pay Britain for giving them a country, infrastructure, British legal system, English language.

Without Britain, there won't even be a country called India.

Britain did the greatest favour to Hindus by giving them a unified country under a central government for the first time in history.

Britain is the founder of India and every Indian should be grateful for the white man for that. India will forever be in debt to the Anglo-Saxon people because India is a creation of the Anglo-Saxon people. Hindus just happened to get the rewards from British creation.

No other group of people benefitted more from British colonial rule than Indians.

 

[Jaat Rock]

LOL Britain gave us unified India?? After looting us they left divided us and left us in pieces. India, Pakistan and many independent states and Sardar Patel did all the hard work to unit India.

 

[Beidou2020]

LOL Britain gave us unified India?? After looting us they left divided us and left us in pieces. India, Pakistan and many independent states and Sardar Patel did all the hard work to unit India.

There was no such thing called 'India' before the British colonised all those little kingdoms and forcefully united them into a fake country called 'India'.

Indians and Africans would be better off living under Anglo-Saxon rule than ruling themselves. Neither Indians nor Africans are capable of governing themselves.

Every Indian should be eternally grateful for the British. The greatest tragedy was that the British left India. If Britain was still ruling India, every Indian would have access to toilets, not have a racist caste system, every Indian adult would be literate, Indians would not be starving to death and Indians would be healthy.

Britain allowing Indians to self-govern was a tragedy.

Indians and Africans are incapable of governing themselves. They both would develop better under Anglo-Saxon rule.

 

[Abotani]

What the heck are you talking about?? Please elaborate....

Sigh
Air attacks in Mizoram, 1966 - our dirty, little secret - timesofindia-economictimes

By March 2, the MNA had overrun the Aizawl treasury and armoury and was at the headquarters of theAssam Rifles. It had also captured several smaller towns south of Aizawl. The military tried to ferry troops and weapons by helicopter, but was driven away by MNA snipers.

So, at 11:30 am on March 5, the air force attacked Aizawl with heavy machine gun fire. On March 6, the attack intensified, and incendiary bombs were dropped. This killed innocents and completely destroyed the four largest areas of the city: Republic Veng, Hmeichche Veng, Dawrpui Veng and Chhinga Veng.

Locals left their homes and fled into the hills in panic. The MNA melted away into surrounding gorges, forests and hills, to camps in Burma and the then East Pakistan. The air force strafed Aizawl and other areas till March 13. One local told a human rights committee set up by Khasi legislators GG Swell and Rev Nichols Roy that, "There were two types of planes which flew over Aizawl — good planes and angry planes. The good planes were those which flew comparatively slowly and did not spit out fire or smoke; the angry planes were those which escaped to a distance before the sound of their coming could be heard and who spat out smoke and fire."

This was the first— and only — time that the air force has been used to attack Indians in India. It cleared Aizawl and other cities of the MNA, but did not finish off the insurgency, which would last for another 20 years. Till the 1980s, the Indian military stoutly denied the use of air attacks in Mizoram in 1966.

By 1967, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act was in force in the area that is now Mizoram. That year, the eastern military brass, led by the then Lt General Maneckshaw, and government decided to implement the second terrible thing it did in Mizoram. This was called 'regrouping of villages.'

At the that time, there was one road coming south from Silchar in Assam, that traveled all the way down to where the state's limits ended. To the east and west of this road were vast tracts of forests, hills and ravines, dotted with hundreds of villages.The military plan was to gather villagers from all over, and cluster them along the side of this road. These new, so-called Protected and Progressive Villages (PPVs), were nothing but concentration camps, minus gas chambers. The movement was supposed to be voluntary — people in some far off hamlet were supposed to jump with joy when told to give up their land, crops and homes to trek hundreds of miles and live behind barbed wire. Actually, the military told villagers to take what they could carry on their backs, and burn everything else down. Elders signed 'consent' papers at gunpoint.

In every case, villagers refused to move. When they were coerced to march, they would refuse to burn down their properties. Then, the military officer and his men would torch the whole place down. They would march in a column guarded by the military, to their designated PPV.

Life here was tough: each resident was numbered and tagged, going and coming was strictly regulated and rations were meagre. In the PPVs' confines, tribal conventions broke down. In the scramble for scarce resources, theft, murder and alcoholism became widespread.

The regrouping destroyed the Mizos' practice of jhum, or shifting cultivation. There was little land inside the PPVs and their original jhum areas had been left far behind in the interiors. Farm output fell off a cliff. Mizoram suffered from near-famine conditions, supplemented by what little the military could provide, for the next three years.

Why were the villagers herded into the PPVs? The military reckoned that keeping villagers under their eyes would keep them from sheltering insurgents or joining the MNA. The original villages, crops and granaries were destroyed to deny wandering insurgents shelter and food.

These ideas were picked up by our officers from the colonial British playbook. The British had regrouped villages during the Boer war in the early 20th century, in Malaya, where they interned Chinese in special camps and in Kenya where villages were uprooted to crush the Mau Mau revolt.

The British could get away with all this because they were inflicting pain on a subject population. The Indian establishment had no such fig leaf: it was giving grief to its own citizens.

The scale of the Mizoram regrouping was awesome. Out of 764 villages, 516 were evacuated and squeezed into 110 PPVs. Only 138 villages were left untouched. In the Aizawl area, about 95% of the rural population was herded into PPVs. No Russian gulag or German concentration camp had hosted such a large chunk of the local population.

The first PPVs were dismantled in 1971, but the last ones continued for another eight years. The MNA revolt ended in 1986. No government has expressed regret for the bombing and regrouping.

Of course everyone knows how Indians behave with women.They could put the ISIS to shame.

 

[Echo_419]

Sigh
Air attacks in Mizoram, 1966 - our dirty, little secret - timesofindia-economictimes

By March 2, the MNA had overrun the Aizawl treasury and armoury and was at the headquarters of theAssam Rifles. It had also captured several smaller towns south of Aizawl. The military tried to ferry troops and weapons by helicopter, but was driven away by MNA snipers.

So, at 11:30 am on March 5, the air force attacked Aizawl with heavy machine gun fire. On March 6, the attack intensified, and incendiary bombs were dropped. This killed innocents and completely destroyed the four largest areas of the city: Republic Veng, Hmeichche Veng, Dawrpui Veng and Chhinga Veng.

Locals left their homes and fled into the hills in panic. The MNA melted away into surrounding gorges, forests and hills, to camps in Burma and the then East Pakistan. The air force strafed Aizawl and other areas till March 13. One local told a human rights committee set up by Khasi legislators GG Swell and Rev Nichols Roy that, "There were two types of planes which flew over Aizawl — good planes and angry planes. The good planes were those which flew comparatively slowly and did not spit out fire or smoke; the angry planes were those which escaped to a distance before the sound of their coming could be heard and who spat out smoke and fire."

This was the first— and only — time that the air force has been used to attack Indians in India. It cleared Aizawl and other cities of the MNA, but did not finish off the insurgency, which would last for another 20 years. Till the 1980s, the Indian military stoutly denied the use of air attacks in Mizoram in 1966.

By 1967, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act was in force in the area that is now Mizoram. That year, the eastern military brass, led by the then Lt General Maneckshaw, and government decided to implement the second terrible thing it did in Mizoram. This was called 'regrouping of villages.'

At the that time, there was one road coming south from Silchar in Assam, that traveled all the way down to where the state's limits ended. To the east and west of this road were vast tracts of forests, hills and ravines, dotted with hundreds of villages.The military plan was to gather villagers from all over, and cluster them along the side of this road. These new, so-called Protected and Progressive Villages (PPVs), were nothing but concentration camps, minus gas chambers. The movement was supposed to be voluntary — people in some far off hamlet were supposed to jump with joy when told to give up their land, crops and homes to trek hundreds of miles and live behind barbed wire. Actually, the military told villagers to take what they could carry on their backs, and burn everything else down. Elders signed 'consent' papers at gunpoint.

In every case, villagers refused to move. When they were coerced to march, they would refuse to burn down their properties. Then, the military officer and his men would torch the whole place down. They would march in a column guarded by the military, to their designated PPV.

Life here was tough: each resident was numbered and tagged, going and coming was strictly regulated and rations were meagre. In the PPVs' confines, tribal conventions broke down. In the scramble for scarce resources, theft, murder and alcoholism became widespread.

The regrouping destroyed the Mizos' practice of jhum, or shifting cultivation. There was little land inside the PPVs and their original jhum areas had been left far behind in the interiors. Farm output fell off a cliff. Mizoram suffered from near-famine conditions, supplemented by what little the military could provide, for the next three years.

Why were the villagers herded into the PPVs? The military reckoned that keeping villagers under their eyes would keep them from sheltering insurgents or joining the MNA. The original villages, crops and granaries were destroyed to deny wandering insurgents shelter and food.

These ideas were picked up by our officers from the colonial British playbook. The British had regrouped villages during the Boer war in the early 20th century, in Malaya, where they interned Chinese in special camps and in Kenya where villages were uprooted to crush the Mau Mau revolt.

The British could get away with all this because they were inflicting pain on a subject population. The Indian establishment had no such fig leaf: it was giving grief to its own citizens.

The scale of the Mizoram regrouping was awesome. Out of 764 villages, 516 were evacuated and squeezed into 110 PPVs. Only 138 villages were left untouched. In the Aizawl area, about 95% of the rural population was herded into PPVs. No Russian gulag or German concentration camp had hosted such a large chunk of the local population.

The first PPVs were dismantled in 1971, but the last ones continued for another eight years. The MNA revolt ended in 1986. No government has expressed regret for the bombing and regrouping.

Of course everyone knows how Indians behave with women.They could put the ISIS to shame.

Must be really frustrating

 

[Abotani]

Must be really frustrating

Sure is.Dealing with numbnuts always is.I am frustrated even right now.

 

[Arya Desa]

Sure is.Dealing with numbnuts always is.I am frustrated even right now.

chinese Indian, why you always so upset?

 

[Echo_419]

Sure is.Dealing with numbnuts always is.I am frustrated even right now.

I was talking about being stuck