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Every once in a while I come across people with nostalgia for British Raj, and I point them to Orwell's essay 'A Hanging' to remind them to thank what gods ther

Every once in a while I come across people with nostalgia for British Raj, and I point them to Orwell's essay 'A Hanging' to remind them to thank what gods there may be that they no longer live in British India.

inglor_cz 3y ago
Wikipedia says that there are currently 488 people on death rows in independent India. Meanwhile, the UK hasn't had death rows for 60 years by now, because death penalty was de facto abolished in the 1960s. If you are an opponent of the death penalty, I cannot see how the current situation is better, much less why gods should be thanked for that difference. If the only thing that matters to you is that it is a native hand that wraps a rope around the condemned's neck, well, in that case I understand where you are coming from, though I don't agree with that. Here in former Czechoslovakia, the death penalty was applied both by occupation powers and our own authorities. Same bad shit, I am glad that it is over, hopefully forever.
- shash 3y ago
  Well, first it was _not_ banned when India became independent, and if anything, the British system was quite trigger happy with it. If you look at just the history of British executions pre 1967, you'll find a massive number of wrongful convictions, being overturned or pardoned decades later. After independence, the use has declined over the decades, and in the last 20 years, it was used seven times - three convicted terrorists (one of whom may have been innocent) and four gang rape convicts (not much doubt about guilt there). It's quite rare that the sentence _isn't_ commuted in the modern era. So, if Britain improved over time, that cannot be used to argue that the situation isn't better in India over the same time; maybe not ideal, but definitely better than at the point of Independence.
- rex_lupi 3y ago
  > "Since 2000, eight executions have been carried out in India, all executions have been carried out by hanging." (Wikipedia) One ought to to check out the offenses committed as well. These are no ordinary crimes. Public opinion matters. It's a large and extremely complex place and "system".
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    Does it matter if you are on the death row? Some of those who are there will be executed, and waiting for decades if you hang or not is pretty inhuman. Once there is a legal sentence of death on you, it is a matter of policy if you actually hang or not, and policy may change with a different PM/governor etc. That feels very bad to me. If a retentionist country wants to hang people, it shouldn't add endless insecurity on top of the punishment. Edit.: interesting that this is controversial enough to be downvoted. Remember Trump signing the death warrants of 13 federal death row inmates during the last 6 months of his presidency? Yeah, once you are legally condemned to death, your actual execution is a matter of electoral random walk, which is pretty nasty.
    - rex_lupi 3y ago
      You should understand, that of those 488 currently in DR, only a small fraction will ever be actually executed. It's practically the same as life term. I hope you are not against that either? The "endless insecurity" is actually deliberate, because people (majority) will actually oppose the abolition of capital punishment. Tangentially, how should a country (read US) deal with terrorists (in the strictest possible sense of the word) who planned and carried out significantly impactful attacks against their citizens? Its probably not being downvoted for that reason. Rather because you're just being plain wrong here.
      - inglor_cz 3y ago
        " only a small fraction will ever be actually executed" How can you know? It is entirely possible that a change in policy will result in all of them hanging within a month. Once you are condemned to death, the only thing between you and the gallows is policy that can be unilaterally changed by whoever decides to carry out the executions or not. The court has spoken, you won't be sentenced again. You are a dead person walking and someone in the executive branch can always decide to let you actually hang. An election of a politician who wants to look tough on crime may result in precisely that. Tangentially, more than half of the world abolished the death penalty even though terrorism does not spare them. Spain lets Basque butchers live behind bars, so does France with its jihadists.
- justworkout 3y ago
  488 people for a country of nearly 1.5 billion is a pretty slim number. The US has 6x the death row inmates despite having less than 1/4 the population. India is pretty far behind the rest of the world, but to be fair, they were enslaved for centuries then dropped and left to build a society from scratch less than a century ago. There are going to be problems, but on many fronts, India is doing better than a lot of countries in some aspects. Instead of comparing them to Western/Central Europe, it's better to compare them to other countries in their class. Countries in Central America, Subsaharan Africa, etc. As someone who just visited a few weeks ago, one thing really impressed me about India: government hospitals provide free service. I had a medical emergency, a total foreigner who pays no taxes, and they helped me without hesitation in my time of need and refused to take a single cent. That's something I can truly admire about their country and something the world could learn from India.
  - badpun 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - rusticpenn 3y ago
      The population of Finland is less than that of many cities in India.
      - badpun 3y ago
        This plays to India's advantage - it could be a very powerful nation, while Finland is small and easily bullied.
        rusticpenn 3y ago
        The population was uneducated and divided when India gained independence.
        rramadass 3y ago
        Silly goose! Do you think a Country's development is mere numbers game? Don't trivialize complex subjects.
- n4r9 3y ago
  You can't know what India would be like if British rule continued to this day. Any comparison is effectively meaningless. The parent comment was arguing against nostalgia for the British Raj, and it's no less justifiable.
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    "You can't know" You can't, but you can at least compare and guess. There are still some colonies extant (e.g. Falklands, Gibraltar, French Guinea, New Caledonia), and when it comes to big stuff like death penalty, they all followed the metropolis. Even former British dominions (Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) abolished the death penalty on a fairly similar schedule.
    - shash 3y ago
      The scale of those colonies is kind of absurd when compared to any even moderately larger territory, leave alone the entirety of India!
    - n4r9 3y ago
      You're so focused on capital punishment as an indicator of social health that you're missing the original point, which is that life was awful for many Indians under the British Raj.
- sumanthvepa 3y ago
  I'm opposed to the death penalty. Thankfully the death penalty is rare in India. But that is not the point I wanted to make. It's that the casual cruelty to Indians was rampant in way that it was not for British. It's not that the the British of that era suddenly became more moral when they went back to their own country. It's that in a democracy, the rulers dare not do what imperial rulers can.(they don't need to be British to be cruel. There were plenty of Mughal and Hindu rulers of equal cruelty.) Independence from British rule gave us our independence and allowed us to become a democracy, and flawed though it may be, democratic India never had famines that killed tens of millions every decade. Freedom and democracy are precious and I think we Indians have started to take it for granted after 75 years of it.
  - kaycey2022 3y ago
    Precisely said. It is simple psychology. I would rather have painful experiences with my own people, with whom we can grow together (hopefully, possibly), rather than an Imperialist who sees me as an other, and who I see as an other. Imperialism is undoubtedly a trauma. We can get past the experience and even do commerce but the distaste and unpleasantness (on an aggregate) will never really go away.
    - sumanthvepa 3y ago
      I wouldn't tolerate cruelty from my own people either. That's the whole point of a democracy. It holds rulers accountable for their actions. (to some extent.) Also, as Mahatma Gandhi pointed out, we should distinguish between British rule of India, and the British people themselves. Indians and India have no problem with the latter, only with the former. Once British rule ended, we have no enmity with Britain. We parted as friends. Indeed Lord Mountbatten is still revered as the first governor general of Independent India. (Apt considering tomorrow is Republic Day.)
      - kaycey2022 3y ago
        Neither would I. I never said I would tolerate cruelty from my own people either. Neither did I say that I hate the British people. But if someone from the country goes around saying that the Raj was a favor to Indians, I wouldn't like this person either. I would think they are an idiot. As for Mr. Mountbatten I am not sure what sort of a person would "revere" this man. He probably wasn't a bad person but he wasn't great enough to be revered either. Just some bureaucrat in the right place at the right time.
Almondsetat 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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inglor_cz 3y ago

Wikipedia says that there are currently 488 people on death rows in independent India. Meanwhile, the UK hasn't had death rows for 60 years by now, because death penalty was de facto abolished in the 1960s. If you are an opponent of the death penalty, I cannot see how the current situation is better, much less why gods should be thanked for that difference. If the only thing that matters to you is that it is a native hand that wraps a rope around the condemned's neck, well, in that case I understand where you are coming from, though I don't agree with that. Here in former Czechoslovakia, the death penalty was applied both by occupation powers and our own authorities. Same bad shit, I am glad that it is over, hopefully forever.

shash 3y ago
Well, first it was _not_ banned when India became independent, and if anything, the British system was quite trigger happy with it. If you look at just the history of British executions pre 1967, you'll find a massive number of wrongful convictions, being overturned or pardoned decades later. After independence, the use has declined over the decades, and in the last 20 years, it was used seven times - three convicted terrorists (one of whom may have been innocent) and four gang rape convicts (not much doubt about guilt there). It's quite rare that the sentence _isn't_ commuted in the modern era. So, if Britain improved over time, that cannot be used to argue that the situation isn't better in India over the same time; maybe not ideal, but definitely better than at the point of Independence.
rex_lupi 3y ago
> "Since 2000, eight executions have been carried out in India, all executions have been carried out by hanging." (Wikipedia) One ought to to check out the offenses committed as well. These are no ordinary crimes. Public opinion matters. It's a large and extremely complex place and "system".
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  Does it matter if you are on the death row? Some of those who are there will be executed, and waiting for decades if you hang or not is pretty inhuman. Once there is a legal sentence of death on you, it is a matter of policy if you actually hang or not, and policy may change with a different PM/governor etc. That feels very bad to me. If a retentionist country wants to hang people, it shouldn't add endless insecurity on top of the punishment. Edit.: interesting that this is controversial enough to be downvoted. Remember Trump signing the death warrants of 13 federal death row inmates during the last 6 months of his presidency? Yeah, once you are legally condemned to death, your actual execution is a matter of electoral random walk, which is pretty nasty.
  - rex_lupi 3y ago
    You should understand, that of those 488 currently in DR, only a small fraction will ever be actually executed. It's practically the same as life term. I hope you are not against that either? The "endless insecurity" is actually deliberate, because people (majority) will actually oppose the abolition of capital punishment. Tangentially, how should a country (read US) deal with terrorists (in the strictest possible sense of the word) who planned and carried out significantly impactful attacks against their citizens? Its probably not being downvoted for that reason. Rather because you're just being plain wrong here.
    - inglor_cz 3y ago
      " only a small fraction will ever be actually executed" How can you know? It is entirely possible that a change in policy will result in all of them hanging within a month. Once you are condemned to death, the only thing between you and the gallows is policy that can be unilaterally changed by whoever decides to carry out the executions or not. The court has spoken, you won't be sentenced again. You are a dead person walking and someone in the executive branch can always decide to let you actually hang. An election of a politician who wants to look tough on crime may result in precisely that. Tangentially, more than half of the world abolished the death penalty even though terrorism does not spare them. Spain lets Basque butchers live behind bars, so does France with its jihadists.
justworkout 3y ago
488 people for a country of nearly 1.5 billion is a pretty slim number. The US has 6x the death row inmates despite having less than 1/4 the population. India is pretty far behind the rest of the world, but to be fair, they were enslaved for centuries then dropped and left to build a society from scratch less than a century ago. There are going to be problems, but on many fronts, India is doing better than a lot of countries in some aspects. Instead of comparing them to Western/Central Europe, it's better to compare them to other countries in their class. Countries in Central America, Subsaharan Africa, etc. As someone who just visited a few weeks ago, one thing really impressed me about India: government hospitals provide free service. I had a medical emergency, a total foreigner who pays no taxes, and they helped me without hesitation in my time of need and refused to take a single cent. That's something I can truly admire about their country and something the world could learn from India.
- badpun 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - rusticpenn 3y ago
    The population of Finland is less than that of many cities in India.
    - badpun 3y ago
      This plays to India's advantage - it could be a very powerful nation, while Finland is small and easily bullied.
      - rusticpenn 3y ago
        The population was uneducated and divided when India gained independence.
      - rramadass 3y ago
        Silly goose! Do you think a Country's development is mere numbers game? Don't trivialize complex subjects.
n4r9 3y ago
You can't know what India would be like if British rule continued to this day. Any comparison is effectively meaningless. The parent comment was arguing against nostalgia for the British Raj, and it's no less justifiable.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  "You can't know" You can't, but you can at least compare and guess. There are still some colonies extant (e.g. Falklands, Gibraltar, French Guinea, New Caledonia), and when it comes to big stuff like death penalty, they all followed the metropolis. Even former British dominions (Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) abolished the death penalty on a fairly similar schedule.
  - shash 3y ago
    The scale of those colonies is kind of absurd when compared to any even moderately larger territory, leave alone the entirety of India!
  - n4r9 3y ago
    You're so focused on capital punishment as an indicator of social health that you're missing the original point, which is that life was awful for many Indians under the British Raj.
sumanthvepa 3y ago
I'm opposed to the death penalty. Thankfully the death penalty is rare in India. But that is not the point I wanted to make. It's that the casual cruelty to Indians was rampant in way that it was not for British. It's not that the the British of that era suddenly became more moral when they went back to their own country. It's that in a democracy, the rulers dare not do what imperial rulers can.(they don't need to be British to be cruel. There were plenty of Mughal and Hindu rulers of equal cruelty.) Independence from British rule gave us our independence and allowed us to become a democracy, and flawed though it may be, democratic India never had famines that killed tens of millions every decade. Freedom and democracy are precious and I think we Indians have started to take it for granted after 75 years of it.
- kaycey2022 3y ago
  Precisely said. It is simple psychology. I would rather have painful experiences with my own people, with whom we can grow together (hopefully, possibly), rather than an Imperialist who sees me as an other, and who I see as an other. Imperialism is undoubtedly a trauma. We can get past the experience and even do commerce but the distaste and unpleasantness (on an aggregate) will never really go away.
  - sumanthvepa 3y ago
    I wouldn't tolerate cruelty from my own people either. That's the whole point of a democracy. It holds rulers accountable for their actions. (to some extent.) Also, as Mahatma Gandhi pointed out, we should distinguish between British rule of India, and the British people themselves. Indians and India have no problem with the latter, only with the former. Once British rule ended, we have no enmity with Britain. We parted as friends. Indeed Lord Mountbatten is still revered as the first governor general of Independent India. (Apt considering tomorrow is Republic Day.)
    - kaycey2022 3y ago
      Neither would I. I never said I would tolerate cruelty from my own people either. Neither did I say that I hate the British people. But if someone from the country goes around saying that the Raj was a favor to Indians, I wouldn't like this person either. I would think they are an idiot. As for Mr. Mountbatten I am not sure what sort of a person would "revere" this man. He probably wasn't a bad person but he wasn't great enough to be revered either. Just some bureaucrat in the right place at the right time.

Almondsetat 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago

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