Indian Muslims, whether Pathans from the north-west or Tamils from the south, were all seen by Arabs as “Hindis”

there is little doubt that some Indian ruler, emulating his forerunners, would have done so.

the dismantling of existing political institutions, the fomenting of communal division and systematic political discrimination with a view to maintaining British domination.

Later, in 1857, the sight of Hindu and Muslim soldiers rebelling together,

As early as 1859, the then British governor of Bombay, Lord Elphinstone, advised London that “Divide et impera was the old Roman maxim, and it should be ours”.

The effort to understand ethnic, religious, sectarian and caste differences among Britain’s subjects inevitably became an exercise in defining, dividing and perpetuating these differences.

As late as 1920, under the Montagu-Chelmsford “reforms”, Indian representatives on the councils – elected by a franchise so restricted and selective that only one in 250 Indians had the right to vote

many other kinds of social strife were labelled as religious due to the colonists’ orientalist assumption that religion was the fundamental division in Indian society.

the creation and perpetuation of Hindu–Muslim antagonism was the most significant accomplishment of British imperial policy

The British ran government, tax collection, and administered what passed for justice.

Indians were excluded from all of these functions.

entire new communities were created by people who had not consciously thought of themselves as particularly different from others around them.

Democracy, in other words, had to be prised from the reluctant grasp of the British by Indian nationalists.

British law had to be imposed upon an older and more complex civilisation with its own legal culture

only three cases can be found of Englishmen executed for murdering Indians, while the murders of thousands more at British hands went unpunished.

In his notorious 1835 Minute on Education, Lord Macaulay articulated the classic reason for teaching English, but only to a small minority of Indians

The language was taught to a few to serve as intermediaries between the rulers and the ruled

But the facts are even more damning.

the third-class compartments, with their wooden benches and total absence of amenities, into which Indians were herded, attracted horrified comment even at the time

their Indian mechanics became so adept that in 1878 they started designing and building their own locomotives.

today rely extensively on Indian technical expertise, provided to them by Rites, a subsidiary of the Indian Railways.

The process of colonial rule in India meant economic exploitation and ruin to millions, the destruction of thriving industries, the systematic denial of opportunities to compete, the elimination of indigenous institutions of governance, the transformation of lifestyles and patterns of living that had flourished since time immemorial, and the obliteration of the most precious possessions of the colonised, their identities and their self-respect.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, British shopkeepers tried to pass off shoddy English-made textiles as Indian in order to charge higher prices for them.

there is no earthly reason why this could not again have been the case, if its resources had not been drained away by the British.

Today Indians cannot live without the railways;

As I’ve often argued, you don’t need to seek revenge upon history. History is its own revenge.