Queen Elizabeth's death gives us a chance to remember English perfidies

There is no atrocity the English have not committed, yet they are well regarded by those whom they tortured and pauperised

The sympathetic global response to the death of a British queen has thrown up an old question: why such regret? After all, there has been no worse set of international bandits, excepting Spain perhaps, than the English. 

There is no atrocity that the English have not committed. Yet they are well regarded by those whom they tortured and pauperised.

I learned about these horrible people in 1973 when my friends and I took the entrance exam for the IAS, IPS, allied services, etc. We would preempt failure by saying we were sitting only for the etc. part. That proved to be true for me, at any rate.

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But it wasn't all wasted effort. The positive externality, as economists call it, was that I learnt British and British constitutional history in great detail. The in-depth reading of Britain's — or more accurately, England's — history made it abundantly clear that the English taught the world hypocrisy. It's encapsulated in that pithy saying, "honesty is the best policy but not practice". 

For 200 years, the English ignored human rights in their entirety. And yet, today, they not only hold themselves up as an exemplar of decency, but they also lecture the rest of the world, saying, "Raat gayi, baat gayi, let's move on." The simple truth is that it was racism, plain and simple. If you were not white, you could be treated like dirt.

Deceit was perfectly ok when dealing with governments of whatever groups in question. Denial of human status was perfectly ok when dealing with non-white people.
 

Whether it was the Māoris of New Zealand or the aborigines of Australia or the Zulus, Xhosas and Pygmy tribes of Southern Africa or the tribes of North America, the approach was the same: we will take what we want, and we will wipe you out.

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That approach was also applied to humans in the slave trade. From India, they exported both people and opium.

Worse, all this was sanctioned by the English crown and actively supported by it. Francis Drake, for example, was just a pirate. He was knighted by the then queen and told to carry on looting. 

Nor was it always the non-whites who got the short end of the stick. Even whites, as in Ireland, saw the nasty, long and brutish aspects of English character. The Irish famines were caused as decidedly by English avarice as the Bengal famine of 1943 was.

Around the time the queen who died recently took over, they stopped teaching their imperial history to their children. And the English have never apologised for all they did to other people. Instead, they have said they brought civilisation to them. There's a saying in Hindi about hypocrisy, "Nau sau choohay kha ke, billi chali...".

They say the victor writes the history, but no one has dressed it all up as the English have.

They beheaded their own king in 1649. They chased out another king in 1688 and called it a 'glorious' revolution. They imported a king from Germany in 1715 who communicated with his minister in Latin and created what they called the cabinet system. The minister became the prime minister only because he could speak Latin.

The list of English perfidies, hypocrisies, outright criminality, as in controlling 90 per cent of the tax-free jurisdictions etc., is endless. That's why it's bewildering to find the Indian

government going overboard, such as even the UP government declaring Sunday as a day of mourning.

It would have been understandable if the dead English queen had been a close personal friend of Indian leaders. But that's a ludicrous expectation.