India and the other occupied territories were sinks for the unemployed of England, both the functionless offspring of the gentry, who became instant experts as soon as they touched foreign shores, and those criminals sentenced to be transported for life for stealing growing crops or poaching wild game. The sending forth of nonentities who become master advisers has been further refined in our time: the UN, INW, WB. FAO, UNESCO, WHO and even “charitable” donor agencies, find an inexhaustible supply of emissaries who come, at our expense, to tell us how to conduct our affairs, for their profit.

Macaulay wrote of those who came to India:

Many of them had sprung from obscurity; they had acquired great wealth in India, and returning home they exhibited it insolently and spent it extravagantly; they had crowds of menials, gold and silver plate, Dresden china, venison and Burgundy wine; but they were still low men.

Macaulay himself fitted quite closely into this category. He had a hard struggle to make a living as a writer in England. On August 17, 1833, the year before he came to India, he wrote to his sister: “I have never made more than £200 a year by my pen, and I cannot support myself in comfort on less than 500.” Through the influence of his friends, a new office was created, that of Law Member of the Government in India, and assigned to Macaulay. The position was extremely elevated, and the salary attached to it was enormous, even princely, by the prevailing standards: £10,000 a year. He was simultaneously appointed Law Commissioner, for which he received an additional £5,000. 

At that time the subsistence income in England was £15 per year per family, while even as late as 1866, there were only 7,500 persons in Britain with incomes of over £5,000 a year.

The British “government” in India, used its unquestioned power to create a bloated bureaucracy, with numerous unneeded offices, set fabulous salaries, with pensions - enough to support them as nabobs in England - to follow after a few years of such “service to India.” Included in those who grew fat on Indian soil, were the British in the army and other military forces. Moreover, their salaries were spent largely in England and their pensions wholly there. Even those posts that could be filled by Indians were given to Europeans. Where Indians were employed, they were paid at much lower rates than foreigners in similar positions.”

A letter to The Times of India of 30 April 1888 stated:

India is the Paradise of Engineers. It is also in this happy land that men who perform duties such as are performed in England by the country road surveyor draw large salaries and are assisted by a large staff of highly paid assistants. No great amount of professional skill is required to dig a village well, build a school house, or line out a village road. These are, however, the most important works that the Executive Engineer and his establishments have to construct in many districts. ... Eight years ago Sir John Strachey in his Budget speech said that “our Public Works Establishments were ... costing no less clan £500,000 a year more than was necessary..,”

Edmund Burke described his British countrymen who fled abroad to make money by the striking phrase, “birds of passage and of prey.” The British complained about other Europeans who encroached on “their” territory. As late as March 1936, a “Genuine British Subject” in Bombay wrote: “These immigrants pour into India, in numbers... They capture posts, send their earnings to their native places and retire to enjoy them in ease and plenty.”

Yet today, when Two-Thirds World governments insist, that as part of the GATT agreement on services, skilled labour be allowed free movement in the West. this is greeted with outraged refusal. The claim that it is a “political matter” is disingenuous. Since labour is the only element in the capitalist process to be denied free movement under the dispensation envisaged within the new world economic order, there is clearly discrimination here; for reasons which are not difficult to discern.

On the other hand, with unemployment high in Europe, TNCs are dismissing Indians who hold top managerial and research posts and replacing them with their own people. They insist that all restrictions on the entry of foreigners be removed. The expatriates are paid European salaries, most of which goes “home.” European unemployment is again being transferred to India.

[An extract from Global Parasites - Five Hundred Years of Western Culture, by Winin Pereira, Jeremy Seabrook, 1994, Earthcare Books, India. ISBN 81-85861-00-9]

[The views expressed in this article are wholly of the authors.]