Income
The major sources of income of the British govern- ment of India were land revenue, and taxes on salt and opium. Income-tax was introduced only in 1886. The money-lenders, landlords and the plantation owners-all existing for the benefit of Britain-were exempted from this tax on the pretext of helping agriculture. Moreover, the rates of income-tax could not be fixed high because that would have hurt mostly the British civil and military personnel.
Salt was and is imperative for health, considering the climate and the vegetarian diet of the great majority of the Indian people. This was the reason why before the British rule everyone could make salt freely for any purpose, trade or personal. The East India Company prohibited this by monopolizing the production and sale of salt and also increased taxes to a fantastic extent. For example, in 1789, the revenue collected from the salt monopoly was, according to the 'Calcutta Gazette' of April 3, 1789, 'a prodigious sum to be collected from a single necessity of life .The tax on salt in England produces on an average £200,000 or about a fourth of the amount in this country, In the late 20's of the 19th century, Charles Grant calculated that the price at which the monopolized salt was sold to the people in Bengal was about 288% above its original cost. In 1844, the Licutenant-Governor of the North-Western Province wrote to the Governor-General that the duty imposed on salt raised its price by 3200%. In 1844, as compared to the Company's early sway, the percentage of revenue on salt increased was, 3,000%, that is, it rose from £100,000 to 'nearly three million and a quarter sterling.' About this unfair policy in salt business by the British, Charles Grant wrote
"Whilst such wickedness as the Afghan campaigns are permitted; whilst commanders-in-chief are allowed to pocket half a million sterling in a few years, for civil duties never performed nor expected to be performed; whilst the salaries of officials obtain on a scale of regal extravagance, out of all proportion even on a highly civilized and prosperous country; whilst the mockery of the home government is continued at its present cost-it is of course impossible to forego the proceeds of a tax, however iniquitous, however fatal, to the industry of the country. To attempt an enumeration of the privations endured, of the oppression, the extortion, and the robbery practised by the subordinates engaged in the salt department of the government, would carry me far beyond my limits.
While the poverty was increasing and famines were growing the revenue on salt and other things went on increasing. W. C. Blunt estimated that by 1883 salt revenue increased to six million sterling and salt price was 1,200 to 2,000% of its cost value. Blunt wrote in his diary on November 26, 1883 "The police are empowered to enter houses, night or day, and, on their accusation of there being a measure of earth salt in it, the owner of the house may be fined fifteen rupees, or imprisoned for a month. Many false accusations are thus brought, and pressure put by the police on the ryots. If the villagers send their cattle to graze anywhere where there is a natural salt on the ground, the owner is fined or imprisoned, and the salt is thrown in heaps and burned. The cattle are dying for want of it, and the people are suffering seriously."
Blunt goes on to say: "The oppressive character of the salt tax is the one great theme of complaint Deccan, its pressure is more galling, because natural salt lies on the ground, and the people are starved of it as it were in sight of plenty. In several villages which I passed the ryots told me that they had been reduced to driving their cattle by night to the places where salt is found, that they may lick it by stealth; but the guards impound them if thus caught infringing the law; and latterly orders have been given that the police should collect in heaps and destroy all salt whatever found in its natural state above ground. In other parts I heard of a kind of leprosy attacking persons deprived of this necessary article of diet; and especially on the sea-coast south of Bombay the disease was spoken of as prevalent.
In 1936-37, the revenue raised from the duty on salt reached no less than £6.6 million or one-quarter of the land revenue. To make this long oppressive story short, the tax on salt was removed only in 1946 by the Interim government, with Nehru occupying the Vice-Presidency of India, in spite of the fact that Ramsay MacDonald, the former British Prime Minister, declared it as 'an exaction and oppression'
Opium and liquor were also the monopoly of the British Company and the Government of India. Cultiva- tors were forced to plant poppies, instead of food crops, even during famines. Farmers were compelled by persecu- tion, flogging and heavy fines. Advances were made to the farmers and they had to supply the stipulated quantity of opium at the valuation fixed by the government. Free- man says "Great persecution is employed by the swarms of the peons to compel the ryot to take advances, and to devote a portion of his land to opium .I have possessed extensive properties in the opium-cultivating districts; and I have seen ryots through tyranny, and to save themselves from persecution, compelled to sow opium in land belong- ing to me, even in the very compound of my house, which I have given them for other purposes.
The motive for employing such barbaric practices was the exorbitant profits (the selling price of opium was more than 200% of its cost) which the British made by selling opium to the Indians and by resorting to illicit trade with the Chinese and Burmese. Strong protest was made by Indians, but to no avail. The central legislature in 1921, for example, passed a bill prohibiting the growth or sale of opium in India, but the British refused to act on it. England had refused at many World Opium Conferences to abandon opium in India; although in England the free use of opium ("poison' as opium was called by British law) was banned. The British opened shops of liquor and cpium at conspicuous places throughout India and 'over- ruled all Hindu protests against this mercenary and inhuman policy. Unknown numbers of Indians were destroyed by the sale of opiates to the Indian people. It is a widely acknowledged fact that in India the "drunkenness and the use of intoxicating drugs increased to an extraordinary degree under English rule.
After comparing the official figures of income and taxes of India, England and Scotland, W. Digby concludes for the year 1900-01-the conclusion, which was more or less true throughout the British rule of India, that "proportionately to income, the Indian subject of the British crown is taxed more than four times higher than is his Scottish fellow-subject, and three times higher than his English compeer.
What can one say of a government which even taxed the mud and leaves used by the poorest people of the poorest country? Just 13 years before Indian indepen- dence, we are told that 'in the poorest parts of the country the people live so sparsely that the Government is at a loss to know what to tax. Consequently the villagers living in Central India, under the administration, of the Forestry Department, have their buffaloes taxed while there is also a tax on the white mud they use to keep their huts clean and the leaves they use for want of plates.
Expenses
These huge taxes were used mainly for the payment of tribute, called Home Charges after 1850, and also to bear expenses of military, police, and other government services, as well as to pay the national debt.
It has been discussed how the British East India Company and its employces extorted fantastic amounts of treasure from India, which made the Industrial Revolu- tion possible in England. It has been observed how a big proportion of the Indian revenue was used by the British for buying goods in India and selling in Europe; thereby making huge fortunes without spending even a single cent of their own. In return, India received neither any goods nor any bullion or services for a long time; and when India did receive anything, it was a very small portion of what she paid.
This process of draining Indian wealth continued at an accelerated speed till the end of the British rule. A full size volume can be written on the tribute, the so-called Home Charges, which should properly be called British charges. Home Charges were the charges which India had to meet in England from her revenues and/or from the excess of exports over the imports. As noticed before, India's exports were forced exports to meet the back-breaking land revenue and heavy home charges in England. Excepting for the very brief period of 'mutiny" of 1857, India's exports to England were always more than India's imports from England. But India did not receive the profit. This profit was applied in England for meeting India's so-called Home Charges.
Colonel Sykes, a distinguished Director of the East India Company, before the House of Commons Select Committee in 1848, estimated the "tribute' as he termed it from India to Britain at £3,300,000 to £3,700,000 a year; and remarked truly that. 'it is only by the excess of exports over imports that India can bear this tribute. These figures should be multiplied with at least 10" to compensate for the declining purchasing power of the pound as discussed earlier.
A distinguished historian of the British colonies sub- mitted a table before the same committee showing the Home Charges, or the amount of Indian revenues spent in England from 1814-15 to 1837-38. About one-fifth of these Home Charges were for stores supplied to India from England. The remaining sums, said Montgomery Martin, "are absolute charges upon the revenues of India, and for which no return whatever is made to India . It is a curious calculation to show that, estimating the sums of money drawn from British India for the last thirty years at three millions per annum, it amounts, at 12 per cent (The Indian rate of interest), compound interest, to £723,997,971; or, if we calculate it at two millions per annum for fifty years, the abstraction of fructifying capital from Hindustan amounts to the incredible sum £8,400,000,000.'
John Sullivan, an eminent English administrator in India from 1804 to 1814, who served in India in various high posts, testified in the same committee in 1848. He said in part "Under their (Indian) own dynasties, all the revenue that was collected in the country was spent in the country; but under our rule, a large proportion of the revenue is annually drained away, and without any return being made for it; this drain has been going on now for sixty or seventy years, and it is rather increasing than the reverse . Our system acts very much like a sponge, drawing up all the good things from the banks of the Ganges, and squeezing them down on the banks of the Thames . They (the people of India) have no voice what- ever in imposing the taxes which they are called upon to pay, no voice in framing the laws which they are bound to obey, no real share in the administration of their own country; and they are denied those rights from the insolent and insulting pretext that they are wanting in mental and moral qualifications for the discharge of such duties.
F. J. Shore, one of the ablest civil servants of British India in the 1830's, has left his impressions of India in his Notes on Indian affairs published in 1837 in two vol- umes "But the halcyon days of India are over; she has been drained of a large proportion of the wealth she once possessed, and her energies have been cramped by a sordid system of misrule to which the interests of millions have been sacrificed for the benefit of the few .The gradual impoverishment of the people and the country, under the mode of rule established by the British Govern- ment, has hastened their (old merchant Princes) fall.
"The Grinding extortion of the English government has effected the impoverishment of the country and people to an extent almost unparalleled.
Major Wingate, who served in various high posts in the Government of Bombay, wrote a book "Our Financial Relations with India' in 1850. He wrote Such is the nature of the tribute we have so long exacted from India . From this explanation some faint conception may be formed of the cruel crushing effect of the tribute upon India The Indian tribute, whether weighed in the scale of justice or viewed in the light of our interests, will be found at variance with humanity, with common sense, and with the received maxims of political science.
This is just the beginning of a story which happened before 1857. The 'cruel and crushing" tribute paid to the British kept on jumping by leaps and bounds after 1857. In 1857, the tribute was £3.5 million; and after about 40 years of Direct British Government's rule, it rose to more than £17 million in 1900-01, excluding the remittances made by European officers employed in India. Including the remittances, the drain of Indian wealth represented nearly one-half of her net revenue; whereas the income of the people certainly did not increase. and probably decreased during this period. This annual tribute has been variously estimated by different writers. In 1886, one of the leaders of England. H. M. Hyndman, after summarizing his figures "We have thus the original disparity of more than £300,000,000 plus £120,000,000 as the drain from India in the twenty years. That amounts to £420,000,000, or £21,000,000 a year. It would be easy to show that the actual drain is much greater than this the export trade of India represents a most exhausting drain on the country.
A. J. Wilson, after describing the "feverish manner in which the English are exploiting India to the uttermost' wrote in 1882 "Let me repeat once more all expendi- ture for all public works, for all guaranteed interest and railway dividends, as well as for State loan interest and State civil and military charges-the ryot pays for as certainly and completely, without abatement or deduction, as if the recipients of the money thus taken out of the country went from door to door and collected every penny of it. Besides what he pays in India to our high officials -our Governors and Governor-General, our 'Supreme Council', with its mock deliberative attributes, our generals and military organization, our judges and collectors-he pays outside his country more than £30,000,000 a year. And what does he get for it? Hunger, starvation, death by famine, even on the optimist's own admission .the follies and crimes that from first to last have marked the career of the English in India.
Wilson delivered an address to the Young Scot's Society, Edinburgh, on October 31, 1906. He said that since 1882, the drain "has at least increased by £3,000,000 in the interval and may have increased by £5,000,000 to £7,000,000" Wilson accepts the lower figure 35 million as the drain. What does this mean to India and Britain? .the bulk of the charges borne by the people of India and paid by them to us as the overlord every year they live are deadweight charges making for their impoverishment, augmenting our wealth.
In 1890, Henry Cotton mentions the drain of Indian wealth as one of the causes of its poverty. He wrote of this drain that it is a moderate computation that the annual drafts from India to Great Britain amount to a total of thirty million pounds,
William Digby, M.P. wrote in 1901 "During the last thirty years of the century the average drain cannot have been far short of £30,000,000 per year, or in the thirty years, £900,000,000 not reckoning interest!'
What effect did this heavy economic drain cause in India and Britain? Digby answers Let each make a further comparison-say, between our own country in 1769-1800 and 1869-1900, and note that, during these periods, we have prospered even more than the Indian people have become increasingly poverty-stricken. 'Pov- erty-stricken?' 'No worse than that, FAMINE-stricken. This comparison made, let it be carried a little farther and heed be paid to this circumstance the wealth drained from India without a direct equivalent, and brought to England, has had not a little to do with the famine con- ditions on the one hand and with the marvellous pros- perity on the other. Indeed, here is to be found the pri- mary cause of India's deplorable condition-the Econo- mic Drain.
Let us now discuss the national debt which was the nucleus of Home Charges and a great means to drain Indian wealth.
The National debt of India meant the debt which people of India as a whole owed either to themselves or to Britain. Most of the national debt of India was held in Britain. For example, in 1890, only 10% of the national debt was held in India and 90% in Britain."
A National debt by itself is not necessarily a bad thing if it is spent for the welfare of the people. But if it is spent partially or wholly for the welfare of the foreign- ers, as was the case with the Indian national debt, then it eventually brings nothing but poverty and famines. In pre-British days, there was no national debt in India. Hindu and Moslem kings, if and when they borrowed, bor- rowed on their own personal credit and not on the credit of the state as was done in Europe before the modern times.
But with the British rule, the national debt of India started. The East India Company's monopoly of trade was completely abolished in 1833; after that year it became an administrative body. But that did not mean, however, that the shareholders of the company stopped receiving dividends. The British government while abolishing the trade monopoly of the company made the provision that the shareholders would receive 101% dividend per year from the revenues of India i.e. taxes collected from the people of India. In this way, the people of India paid £15,120,000 as dividends from 1833-58 to the British shareholders of the company."
In 1792, the national debt was £7 million and it jumped up to over £33 million in 1836. The main reasons were the expenses incurred by the company in sending expeditions inside and outside the country, alongwith the expenses on their establishments outside India. In other words, the people of India had to incur a debt on which they also had to pay interest, so that the British could conquer India and other nations for the British trade, commerce, and empire.
Then came the wars with Afghanistan, Burma and Punjab waged for British imperial and trade interests. The Indian British government had to follow the policy of the British government in waging wars with foreign countries. The expenses of these costly wars were charged entirely to the Indian taxpayers, in spite of the fact that even the Gov- ernment of India and a few liberal minded British politicians vehemently protested against it.
The second important cause of the debt was the most expensive civil and military administration, run almost ex- clusively by the most highly paid British officials, to be described later. Even after paying these extravagant ex- penses of war, and of British officials, Indian revenue exceeded the Indian expenditure from the beginning of the British rule up to 1858. If India had to pay no 'tribute' or 'home charges' to her masters, in the words of an eminent Indian economist who pronounces his judgment on the basis of official figures, "India would have no Public Debt when she was transferred from the Company to the Crown in 1858, but a large balance in her favour. The whole of the Public Debt of India built up in a century of the Com- pany's rule, was created by debiting India with the expenses incurred in England, which in fairness and equity was not due from India . Great Britain had gained far more from India than was represented by the Home Charges; Great Britain should in equity and fairness have borne those charges; and India morally and justly had no Public Debt in 1858, but, on the contrary, could claim credit for excess payments made.
The national debt of India rose from over £33 million in 1836 to £59 million just before the so-called 'mutiny in 1857. The 'mutiny" added to the burden of the Indian taxpayers by more than £10 million. As a result, on April 30, 1858, the total debt of India stood at £69 million.
The total cost of suppressing the 'mutiny" came to be £40 million. This sum included the charges of the British military not only when they were in India, but also when they were in England six months prior to sailing for India, to suppress the people who dared to ask the British to un- load their "burden' Britain did not pay a single cent when India's forces fought outside the country purely for Britain. When the British Forces came to India to suppress its people Britain did not pay anything at all; Indians had to pay for British forces even six months before they sailed for India. That means in both cascs, Indian people had to pay to the British.
After the 'mutiny" the British government bought the company and the reign of Indian administration was taken over by them directly. The purchase money of £12 million was not paid by the British taxpayers; but by the Indian taxpayers. India paid her own money to the Britons to be bought by the Britons. Not only that, India also paid the debt of the British government which the latter owed to the Company as the Company was required by the Act of 1769 to contribute £400,000 annually to the British government at 2% interest."
That was not all. All the debts, bonds and debentures of the Company in Britain or anywhere else in the world were made 'chargeable upon the revenues of India alone. These preposterous sums of money were raised as loans by the British mainly from the British, on which interest had to be paid to the British from the pockets of the Indian people and the Indian people alone. What justice, what morality?
Consequently, the national debt of India jumped from $59 million to more than £119 million in just 12 years (1858 to 1870-01) of direct administration of the British government, though the taxes raised during this period were more than 50 per cent. And in 1876-77 this debt stood at £139 million. This meant that the British government doubled the national debt of India within 19 years. Out of a £139 million debt, only £24 million was spent on state railways and irrigation, which were undertaken mainly for the benefit of Britain.
This figure went on swelling so much so that on the eve of the Second World War in 1939, the Indian debt was £884.2 million, more than 12 times what was in 1858. Despite that, taxes on the people also went on swelling. Especially significant was the high jump in the debt in Eng- land for which higher interest was to be paid. In 1856 the debt in England was under £4 million, which jumped up to £351.8 million by 1939.
The increase in the taxation and the national debt can partly be explained when we glimpse at the massive expen- diture incurred on the Indian civil and military establish- ments for the purpose of exploiting India.
Sir Valentine Chirol wrote in 1926 that the 'military expenditure is itself much the heaviest of all the burdens to be borne by the Indian taxpayer who . has no means of controlling the amount or the purpose to which it is applied.
According to Prof. D. K. Fieldhouse, Beit lecturer of history in the Oxford University, the Indian army expenditure in 1891-92 was 42%; in 1911-12, 36%; and in 1929-30, 31% of the total Indian revenue. (Before 1891-92, it was more than 50%.) By contrast, Britain, the master of the biggest empire, spent 38% of her total budget of defence in 1890; but only about 14% in the 1920's. According to Arnold Toynbee, the percentages of military expenditure in the national budgets of various countries in 1929 (the peace year) were as follows India .45.29, Japan .26.57, Italy. .23.46, France .19.75, U.S.A. .16.09, Great Britain .14.75, and Germany (pre-Hitler) .7.16.
There were two armies in India; one was the 'British army composed entirely of Britons whose chief function was 'to crush any attempt on the part of the Indian people to overthrow British rule. The Second was known as the Indian army, whose chief function was to protect the "brigh- test jewel" from others, for the British; and go outside the country to subjugate others, again for the British. India pro- vided only the cannon fodder and the immense money for both the armies.
In the so-called "Indian army", the soldiers were Indians, but most officers were British. Indians were very seldom made officers above the rank of platoon commander and no Indian ever rose above the rank of Brigadier until the very end of British rule in 1947. Even in the Second World War, where British officers were in short supply, only three Indians commanded brigades when the Indian army was two million strong." Both these armies were entirely financed by the Indian people. The pay of the officers (almost exclusively British) 'was much higher' even in comparison with the then richest England.
What was the importance of the Indian army to Bri- tain? Fieldhouse gives the answer "The importance of the army can be seen only in the context of Britain's interna- tional position during the nineteenth century. She was the greatest naval power of all; but militarily she was negligible and her regular army of about a quarter of a million had to garrison a world-wide empire. India made her the greatest territorial power in the east, maintaining an army of some 150,000 which could rapidly be expanded in time of war.
This was a net profit to Britain, for it was paid for entirely out of Indian revenues by contrast, the puny contributions the imperial federationists hoped for from the self-governing colonies after 1880 would have been insigni- ficant. India enabled Britain to play a role in world affairs which the British taxpayer would not have been willing to pay for: to take a major part in the partition of East Africa and South-East Asia, and to conquer much of the Ottoman empire during the First World War.
India not only incurred huge expenditure on both armies, but on the British navy as well on the pretext that it pro- tected the shores and trade of India. The argument of "protecting the shores' is exactly like the argument of the robbers who protect the gate of the house where they are engaged in their nefarious activities. The same type of argument that Britain protected the 13 colonies (later U.S.A.) was given at the time of the American Revolution. The answer which Thomas Paine gave could also apply to India. Britain, Paine said, "did not protect us from our enemies on our account, but from her enemies on her own account, from those who had no quarrel with us on any other account, and who will always be our enemies on the same account.
Regarding the trade of India, J.S. Cotton, a retired government of India official, who was the editor of the go- vernment's 'Imperial Gazetteer, said: "The trade for export, even in upcountry markets, is largely in the hands of a few European firms who make their purchases through brokers, and the business of shipping at the port is almost entirely conducted by European firms to whom the Indian traders consign their purchases by rail. The import trade also is mainly in European hands.”
In simple words, the foreign trade carried on by the British, in British ships, insured by British firms, financed by the British for the benefit of the British, was protected by the British navy; India paid only the bill just as she paid for the army.
Civil services, again catering to the interests of Britain and officered exclusively or mainly by Britons, was another very heavy expenditure. There was not even a single Indian employed in the covenanted (higher) Services of the company; although the British had to employ Indians in lower jobs. By 1915, only 5% Covenanted Services (I.C.S.) were held by Indians. As the nationalists' pressure and difficulty of Britons' recruitment to I.C.S. increased in the 20th cen- tury, the British had to "buy off discontent with good jobs, good careers', and had to start holding I.C.S. examina- tion in India from 1922 (before that it used to be held in England alone). As a result more and more I.C.S. jobs were given to Indians although the 'Indianisation' of Indian ser- vices-civil and not military-were noticeable only after 1935 i.e. 12 years before independence. But these few Indian officers did not decide or influence the basic and important policies of the British, rather they proved to be one of the props and pillars of British imperialism in India.
Much nonsense is talked about that these I.C.S. people were the cream of British intelligentsia; and Britain, there- fore, impoverished herself to administer (or loot) India. The fact is that 'the Civil Service Commissioners had voiced dis- satisfaction with the calibre of civilian recruits as early as 1858, only four years after the establishment of the com- petitive system (in the late 19th century) a substantial number of candidates had not attended any university, a phenomenon that became increasingly evident in later com- petitions Indian service of any sort, including the highest echelon positions filled by non-civilians, was widely regarded as an enterprise solely for second rate minds and middle- class citizens.'
The government officials of a poor country, if their pur- pose is not to loot and "bleed" the nation, would be paid much less than the government officials of a rich country. But in India's case, that was not to be, higher officers were very highly paid, whereas the lower jobs held by the Indi- ans were very niggardly paid.
The rates of salaries and pensions of the I.C.S. officers of the poorest country 'were about 50 per cent higher than those of civil servants" of what was then richest country in the world, Britain. Besides, they received privileges such as 21 months leave on full pay or five months leave on half pay after every one year's service and free passage for an officer and his family to, and from, Britain. What a gene- rous pension these I.C.S. Officers earned can be well ima- gined when we are told that even the pension of only one of the British officers, Strachey, was equal to yearly income of 1,200 agriculturists in Madras. It is no won- der that many of these British Nabobs (about 50%) retired on such a princely pension in their early forties.""" An Ameri- can author wrote in 1938 that 1,107 total I.C.S. personnel (not military personnel) in India 'costs about 25,000,000 rup- pees ($9,250,000—author's figure) per year, which is approxi- mately 1.25% of the total budget; as opposed to less than 11% on agriculture which directly supported about 300 million people.
However, this does not include the splendid salaries of the Viceroy and the superb edifice of the Secretary of State and their staff; although the latter was a member of the Bri- tish Cabinet and, therefore, should have been paid by the British taxpayers. The 'most powerful single human being in the world", the immediate dictator of India (as opposed to the remote dictator-the Secretary of State), the Viceroy's salary 'was the highest of any British official. Not since the days of the Roman Empire, when populations had in any case being much smaller, had such a proconsulship lain in the gift of a government.
Mahatma Gandhi wrote a letter to the then Viceroy of India in 1930 on the eve of starting a nation-wide peace- ful agitation against the harsh salt tax. Pointing out that the Indian administration was "demonstrably the most ex- pensive in the world, Gandhi said, "Take your own salary. It is over Rs. 21,000 per month at the present rate of ex- change. You are getting over Rs. 700 per day, against India's average income of less than 2 annas (One rupee=16 annas) per day. The Prime Minister (of Britain) gets Rs. 180 per day against Britain's average income of nearly Rs. 2 per day. What is true of the Viceregal salary is true generally of the whole administration.
Lala Lajpat Rai, another great leader of India, commonly known as 'lion of Punjab', compared the cost of ad- ministration in India, Japan, and the U.S.A. in 1917. He wrote
"The President of the United States, who ranks with the great royalties of the world in position, gets a salary of $75,000 without any other allowance. The Prime Minister of Japan gets 1,200 yen, or $6,000. The Viceroy and the Governor-General of India gets 250,000 rupees, or $83,000, besides a very large amount in the shape of various allow- ances. The cabinet ministers of the United States get a salary of $12,000 each, the Japanese 8,000 yen, or $4,000, and the Members of the Viceroy's Council $26,700 each."
Lajpat Rai compares the salaries of the various officials of these three countries, showing such staggering disparities in their incomes in the appendix of his book, "England's Debt to India' This book was published in 1917 in the United States of America. The British government of India banned its entry into India.
Not only India had to pay for this heaviest administra- tion, she had to pay also for every conceivable item which could possibly be remotely connected with India. Prof. L. H. Jenks wrote in 1927
"The burdens that it was found convenient to charge to India seem preposterous. The costs of the Mutiny, the price of the transfer of the Company's right to the Crown, the ex- penses of simultaneous wars in China and Abyssinia, every governmental item in London that remotely related to India down to the fees of the char-women in the Indian Office and the expenses of ships that sailed but did not participate in hostilities and the cost of India regiments for six months' training at home before they sailed-all were charged to the account of the unrepresented ryot. The Sultan of Turkey visited London in 1868 in state, and his official ball was arranged for at the India Office and the bill charged to India. A lunatic asylum in Ealing, gifts to members of a Zanzibar mission, the consular and diplomatic establishments of Great Britain in China and Persia, part of the permanent expenses of the Mediterranean fleet and the entire cost of a line of telegraph from England to India had been charged before 1870 to the Indian Treasury. It is small wonder that the Indian revenues swelled from £33 million to £52 million a year during the first thirteen years of Crown administra- tion, and that deficits accumulated from 1866 to 1870 amount- ing to £111 millon. A Home Debt of £30,000,000 was brou- ght into existence between 1857 and 1860 and steadily added to, while British statesmen achieved reputation for economy and financial skill through the judicious manipulation of the Indian accounts.
There were also many small expenditures for the pur- poses of the loot of India. Only one example is given here although they can be 'multiplied almost indefinitely" where the land of non-Christians had to pay taxes to support the churches of their rulers i.c. the Anglican church and church of Scotland. For a very considerable number of years throughout the British rule, Bishops and Chaplains enjoying all sorts of luxurious life and living in magnificent palaces were paid from the taxes of the Indian people. The sum of £200,000 per annum, R. Reynold told us in 1937, 'is still paid from the Indian revenues to finance the Chris- tian Church. .(which) is simply a tribute from the native people of India to the principal religious institution of their conquerors. For just the outfit and passage of Bishops of Calcutta and Bombay and a member of the Governor General's Council, £2,450 and £1,200 were paid respectively from the loans advanced to India by Britain in about 1909 on which India also had to pay interest.
In this way, almost all the heavy taxes, paid by the people of India were spent for the purposes of robbing the people on one pretext or the other. Almost nothing was left for the economic, social, cultural, educational and other developments of the people for which governments are sup- posed to exist. Take for example education. In 1890 'the total expenditure on primary education in India from the funds of the State at the present time does not exceed two hundred thousand pounds. There is no free education still less is it compulsory. Not more than one-sixth of the number of boys of school-going age are attending school and there is only one primary school to five villages.
This education expenditure of £200,000 in a country of about 300 million people (at that time) would be equal to the salary of a few top British officers of India.
This was in the country where immediately before the British rule, all impartial authorities agree, every village had at least a primary school. J. Keir Hardie, member of the British Parliament and the leader of the British Independent Labour Party-the forerunner of the present British Labour Party, wrote in 1909
"What we have done for education in India is another boast frequently heard. Here, also, so far at least as the older provinces of India are concerned, the boast is ill-founded. The total number of children attending schools in the whole of India, including the native states, is only about five milli- ons, and the cost which the Government of India spends upon education works out at about 1d. per head. The mili- tary expenditure, I may add in passing, averages 1s. per head of the population. Max Mueller, on the strength of official documents and a missionary report concerning education in Bengal prior to the British occupation, asserts that there were then 80,000 native schools in Bengal, or one for every 400 of the population. Ludlok, in his 'History of British India', says that 'in every Hindu village which has retained its old form I am assured that the children generally are able to read, write, and cipher, but, where we have swept away the village system as in Bangal there the village school had also disap- peared. That I think disposes effectively of the boast that we are beginning to give education to the people of India.
Even during the British rule, the Indian State of Tra- vancore (the part of the State of Kerala now, where literacy percentage is the highest in India) began to organize popular education in 1801; whereas in England it started to be organized in 1870, though in England-ruled India, it was never organized on a popular basis. We are told in 1909 that in the native states of Mysore and Baroda education was free and compulsory."
When the British left the country in 1947, they left behind, not only in economy, but also in illiteracy, one of the darkest spots in the world, where only about 15% people were able to read and write enough to maintain the supply of clerks for British Indian needs of administration, and enough to keep these clerks' wages down as their supply was more than the demand, and, therefore, always a pool of edu- cated unemployed was there who were ready to serve even at fantastically low wages. A south American author right- ly remarks that "barring the masses from education was of course in the interest of the colonizing power. A small caste of educated Indians was enough to help them administer the rest. In this figure of about 15% included those litera- tes, who were so, because of the efforts of private agencies and individuals, and because of the popular ministries set up in the provinces in the thirties of the present century.
Since clerks do not need any technical or semi-techni- cal knowledge, such an education was shelved in the interest of British imperialism. An American authority near the end of the British rule in 1934, says that 'in such fields as agriculture, commerce, and engineering, one sparsely set- tled American state, such as Iowa, with one per cent of the population of British India, has more students.
Reverting back to the discussion of national debt, due to such heavy and unproductive expenditures, it reached mon- strous proportions of £884.2 million by 1939. Then came the Second World War. As in the First World War, India was committed to the Second World War by a representative of the dictatorial regime, the British Viceroy of India, without any consultation whatsoever with the Indian leaders or people. One foreigner committed a nation of 400 million to the war, which was not at all in their interests. For the British war, fought by Britain to keep intact the old order, India had to sacrifice everything including men, material and money, as it had in the First World War. Britain acquired goods and services in India at artificially controlled low prices. This meant that the Indians had to pay enormously high prices even for their daily needs. In return, India received the British I.O.U.'s and cartloads of currency notes adding a tremendous amount of misery to the already miserable peo- ple, in the shape of gross inflation and famine. India, re- duced to extreme poverty, could become the creditor to one of the wealthiest countries. This happened only because India was a slave country and had to sell enormous goods and services to the master to such an extent that India's national debt to Britain, piled up like a huge mound in the last about 150 years, was more than wiped out in just few years' time of the Second World War. Now she became a cre- ditor of Britain to the tune of approximately £550,000,000. However, this did not mean that India was no longer a profitable colony. After giving facts and figures, an Ameri- can author concluded in 1945 that "today, as before the war, India is the most valuable of the world's colonies.