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On the day Queen Elizabeth II died, the whole world joined hands to moan Britain's beloved and longest reigning monarch, but several in the African community used the event to highlight the atrocities committed by the British empire on its colonies. Questions have been raised why the queen remained the figure head for a former slave colony 60 years after its independence.
An African American professor at Carnegie Mellon University tweeted, "I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating,' tweeted Uju Anya. She later deleted her post. Her views were supported by many others, who celebrated queen's demise.
These comments didn't go down well with Fox News host Tucker Carlson who aired his comments in queen's favour and used India as an example. "When the British pulled out of India, they left behind an entire civilization, a language, a legal system, schools, churches and public buildings, all of which are still in use today. Here's the train station the English built in Bombay, for example.'
He further added, ‘after 75 years of independence, has that country produced a single building as beautiful as the Bombay train station that the British colonialists built? No, sadly, it has not. Not one.’
May be Mr Carlon hasn't visited India to see the Taj Mahal, Ajanta Caves, Sun Temple and the newly built Sardar Patel statue.
He ended his 5.41 minutes long soliloquy by stating, “Slander the ruler, discredit the entire period she lived in. And that's exactly why they're attacking Queen Elizabeth tonight—not because she was a bad person, she wasn't a bad person, but because she lived during a better time."
What Tucker may have forgotten is that, the British found its place in the world through its colonial empire, which was built on genocide, slavery and theft. Monarchy's wealth and status was built at a cost paid by colonies like India. The most precious jewel that queen wore on her crown, Kohinoor, too came from India. That's why Tucker's statement have fumed Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, who tweeted his response to Tucker's video, "I think @twitter ought to have an option for something to press when you can’t respond without losing your cool. For now I will content myself with😡 🤬
Arnaud Bertrand, Entrepreneur who previously founded House Trip, and to whose tweet Tharoor responded stated, “Funny, when I travelled all over India, the most stunning buildings I saw weren't built by the British but by Indians themselves! That was before colonialism, when they could still afford to... Colonialism wrecked India, it didn't build it. They're only just starting to recover."
It was Shashi Tharoor's famous Oxford speech in 2015 which ended with a standing ovation at UK's biggest University, that exposed the Raj rule claiming "Britain owes reparations to her former colonies". He argued that Britain's economic progress was financed by the economic exploitation and deindustrialisation of British India. Tharoor further stated, supposed benefits of British colonialism, such as railways and democracy, were either constructed for the purposes of furthering economic exploitation or devised by Indians themselves.
“So, all notions that the British were trying to do their colonial enterprise out of enlightened despotism to try and bring the benefits of colonialism and civilisation to the benighted. Even I am sorry – Churchill's conduct in 1943 is simply one example of many that gave light to this myth," Tharoor mentioned.