COLUMN/ THE HOT POTATO
Nadim Siraj
September 9, 2022: Since yesterday, the entire popular press in India has been beaming blown-up headlines screaming: ‘The Queen is Dead’, ‘Queen Passes Away at 96’, ‘Queen Elizabeth is No More’, ‘Queen Elizabeth II: An Inscrutable Monarch’, and similar stuff.
If a hypothetical alien were to touch down in India these days, it would definitely be misled by the morning papers and TV news headlines into thinking Elizabeth was the queen of India. The point is, why are domestic news organisations in India addressing her as just the queen, and not as the British queen, or the UK queen, or the English queen?
Elizabeth is dead. She spent 96 years on Planet Earth. And 70 long years as the CEO of the biggest and most notorious criminal cartel of all time – technically called the British Empire. Her passing away is a moment of distress and shock only for the illegitimately-wealthy members of her family, for the financially-insulated inhabitants of the criminal empire’s palace called Buckingham, and for perversion-prone fanatics of the historical mafia family popularly called ‘royals’.
But her death is in no way a cause for distress and shock for citizens of India. In simple words, Elizabeth represented the mafia family that once colonised the Indian peninsula, kept Indians under their boots, humiliated them left and right through racist policies, and swindled an incalculable amount of financial and natural wealth.
It’s a matter of national shame that Indian media organisations that brag about their brand of journalism have been addressing Elizabeth as if she were India’s queen.
If this is not a classical example of a mindless colonial hangover, what is?
The depth, height, and span of the systematic loot of India by the fraudulent British family between 1858 and 1947 cannot be easily estimated. The loot was so enormous, so gigantic that the figures we cite during discourses on colonial-era crimes are only the tip of the iceberg.
Elizabeth, from the rainy little British island, represented that criminal legacy.
Four years ago, economist Utsa Patnaik calculated that the British thugs – comprising the crooked and deceitful East India Company as well as the dishonest London royal family – had siphoned off a mindboggling 45 trillion dollars from the Indian subcontinent during the British terror reign between 1765 and 1938. (Note that the East India Company plundered India from 1757 to 1858, and the royal family took over the honours from 1858 to 1947).
A robbery to the tune of $45 trillion! Elizabeth, from the rainy little British island, represented that criminal legacy.
The monumental financial loot aside, the British lawbreakers used India as their illegitimate base camp from where they launched various wars, interventions, disruptions, sabotage attempts, spying missions, geopolitical scams, and colonial projects across Asia and Australasia, especially targeting China.
Elizabeth, from the rainy little British island, represented that criminal legacy.
It doesn’t end there. Historical British criminality is a damn long laundry list. It doesn’t end in a hurry. Yet another obnoxious legacy of Buckingham Palace is a string of lethal famines that were allowed to happen on the Indian subcontinent from time to time. Tens of millions perished due to hunger, thanks to the colonisers’ strategic policy of triggering famines.
Elizabeth, from the rainy little British island, represented that criminal legacy.
Food revolutionary and firebrand orator Vandana Shiva interprets the British terror reign in a straightforward way. In her writings and lectures, she points out that during the time of the unlawful British Raj, the Indians were technically civilised because they never showed any historical tendency to invade and loot other lands. The Brits, on the other hand, were technically uncivilised because of their raw, unrefined, and predatory nature to invade and loot other lands.
Elizabeth became the queen or the CEO of the British kingdom in 1952. That’s five years after India’s freedom fighters and geopolitical forces simultaneously kicked the Englishmen out of the subcontinent.
But that doesn’t spare her – now posthumously – from owning up to that perverse, atrocious, and disgusting legacy. And the same goes with another Buckingham resident – a king called Charles – who is now the new CEO of the dirty empire.
Considering the disservice and the irreversible damage that the dangerous family from the rainy little British island has done to India – and still keeps doing through other means (FDI, trade, loans, etc.) – the least that the Indian media could do is to report Elizabeth’s death in a dignified manner.
Elizabeth’s death has exposed toxic traces of colonial hangover and lack of spine in India’s elite and influential newsrooms. Sadly, it’s having a domino effect on the national psyche.
Indians should realise that to respect her legacy just because she’s no more is an insult to our freedom fighters who toiled hard to free our land from colonial control.
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