............... In this case the exploiters fully exercise their political and economic power for their own economic exploitation. The second half of British rule in India was characterized by imperialist exploitation. In fact, the imperialist exploitation of Bengal can be traced to the rein of the Mughal Emperor Akbar about 400 years ago. There is a reference in the book Ain-E-Akbari [The Laws of Akbar] that Bengal had to supply 23,301 cavalrymen, 801,159 infantrymen, 4,400 ships, 4,260 cannons and 108 elephants to the Mughal army. Bengal also had to pay a large tribute to meet Akbar's military expenses, supply provisions to the Mughal army, and pay taxes to offset the losses incurred in Akbar's campaigns. And when Aurangzeb deployed a large Mughal army to suppress the Marathas in the Deccan, Bengal again had to supply a large part of the provisions and running expenses of his army. In the process, the economy of Bengal was completely drained and the people impoverished. As a result of the Mughal exploitation, Bengal was confronted by a series of economic disasters and famines, and the Mughal rulers, with the help of their functionaries, ruthlessly suppressed all local revolts.
The Mughal misrule of Bengal was closely followed by the British colonial and imperialist exploitation. When Clive left India, he took away millions of rupees in cash. The East India Company and its employees took a bribe of thirty million rupees to carry out the exploitation of Bengal, and the British officers looted and plundered a vast amount of wealth from the palaces of the indigenous rulers.
As a result of the devastating famine of 1770, about ten million people died, including artisans, skilled labourers and farmers. Before India entered the nineteenth century, all of Bengal’s important industries had been destroyed. Dhaka, a most prosperous city, was a famous weaving and commercial centre, but it lost its pre-eminence and the population declined because the people were uprooted from their traditional means of livelihood. The unemployed skilled labourers left Dhaka and travelled to the countryside in search of new occupations, and finally took to agriculture. Naturally, these new workers became landless labourers and the agricultural sector became overcrowded. This was how important industrial centres such as Murshidabad and Pandua lost their economic prosperity. Innumerable unemployed youth were created in the industrial sector of Bengal’s economy, and they had no alternative but to resort to agriculture.
After completely destroying the industries of Bengal, the British capitalists turned their attention to the rural sector. In 1779 the British colonialists forced the Bengali peasants to cultivate indigo in their paddy lands because there was a great demand for colour dyes in the European market. The problem was that once indigo was planted it took two to three years to mature, and in this time no other crops could be cultivated. The peasants refused to cultivate indigo instead of paddy, and consequently they were subjected to inhuman torture and oppression. This continued for eighty years, then the people of Bengal revolted and the cultivation of indigo stopped.
Along with the cultivation of indigo, the British merchants cast their greedy eyes on Bengal’s jute and tea industries. In order to further increase their profits, they began to exploit these two commodities. In 1793 Lord Cornwallis tried to impose British feudalism on the rural economy of Bengal through the system of permanent settlements. According to this system, zamindars were armed with enormous economic power. They were given the authority to impose revenue taxes on land, evict farmers, arbitrarily sell farmers’ movable and immovable property, and if necessary prosecute farmers and sentence them to death. In exchange for all these privileges, the landlords had to pay a fixed amount of money to the British Raj at the end of each year. If that amount was not deposited in the treasury at the appointed time, the landholdings of the landlord were auctioned. Naturally no landlord wanted his land auctioned, so regardless of the climatic conditions or the size of the crops, he forced the farmers to pay the required taxes. Besides paying their government revenue, the landlords always tried to make a profit, so they collected more than the prescribed amount from the farmers.
The landlords, however, encountered certain difficulties when they tried to collect tax revenues directly by moving from place to place. Consequently, the system of collecting taxes through agents was introduced. These agents gave the responsibility for collecting taxes to another set of people, thus between the landlord and the farmer there were agents of different strata. The agents at the lowest stratum used to deduct a certain percentage of the tax revenue and give the rest to the higher level agents. Thus, the farmers had to bear the brunt of this enormous financial burden. Moreover, the agents did not issue any receipts, so there was no limit to the exploitation and looting of the farmers who were impoverished beyond their means.
Besides the landlords and their agents, another group of exploiters emerged who took advantage of the poverty of the farmers. These were the moneylenders, who lent money to the farmers at exorbitant rates of interest. The farmers were forced to take loans which they could never repay, so they mortgaged their lands. Eventually the moneylenders became the owners of the farmers’ lands, and the farmers were thus converted into landless labourers. Such a huge population of landless labourers was found only in Bengal.
The complement to economic exploitation is political oppression. British political exploitation reduced the number of Bengalees by dividing Greater Bengal into numerous fragments and annexing those areas to adjoining states. The people of Bengal were deprived of the natural resources of those regions which were later formed into Assam, Bihar and Orissa. The ethnic Bengalees of those areas, after only a few generations, became separated from the main stream of Bengali life and culture. The British did not apply this principle of “divide and rule” to any other part of India. Just to perpetuate their economic exploitation in Bengal, the British resorted to political oppression. Bengalees had experienced the tyranny of highly placed people, but they had never before experienced oppression that completely stifled their means of commerce and livelihood, and almost destroyed their very existence.
In 1947, when the British left India, another era of exploitation by Indian imperialists started in the wake of the partition of Bengal. Despite the long period of British exploitation, in the initial phase after independence the state of Bengal was more advanced than any other state in India, and many Bengali industrialists had developed. The outsiders started to systematically eliminate the Bengali industrialists from specific areas of trade and industry. This methodical economic oppression of Bengal started immediately after India attained freedom.
During this period, West Bengal’s paddy land was converted into jute production in order to earn more foreign exchange from jute. The farmers were losers on two fronts. First, their income from paddy was totally stopped, and secondly, they were not given the market value of the jute they produced. The outsiders benefited in two ways. They exported much of their jute to foreign countries to earn foreign exchange, and they supplied rice to Bengal produced in their own areas. At that time there were approximately eighty jute mills in West Bengal, all owned by outsiders who made a total profit of hundreds of millions of rupees per annum. The central government earned a similar amount by exporting jute, and another few hundred million rupees as taxes, duties, etc., on jute products. About twenty percent of India’s total foreign exchange came from Bengal’s jute industry, but Bengal’s indigenous jute farmers were deprived of any profit from jute production.
West Bengal earns no percentage of the foreign exchange acquired from its natural resources. The central government sells cotton to Maharashtra and Gujarat at comparatively low prices, whereas the farmers of Bengal are forced to buy the same commodities at high prices. Naturally the cost of producing cotton cloth and hand-spun clothes is higher in Bengal than in other states. The same thing applies in the case of sugar. Furthermore, Bengal has to sell coal and iron ore to other parts of the country without making any profit, and it has to buy edible oil and other essential food items at extra cost.
Due to this exploitation by outsiders, the economic structure of Bengal has been shattered and a large percentage of Bengal’s population now lives below the poverty line. Tens of millions of rupees are drained out of West Bengal every month by outsiders, and many of Bengal’s own industrial enterprises have been destroyed. The important industrial sectors together with trade and commerce are now in the hands of outsiders. Millions of able-bodied young Bengalees are unemployed, whereas the non-Bengali capitalists employ much of their work-force from outside the state. (Economic Exploitation of Bengal - Prout in a Nutshell Part 19 [a compilation] - 1981, Calcutta )
Posted by proutist-universal on March 9, 2007 02:53 AM
