THE Revolt of 1857 must be set in the larger context of what colonialism was doing to India and its people at the time.
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First of all, colonialism involved a constant and devastating drain on India’s resources. For 1854-55, just two years before the Revolt, the annual drain was about Rs. 5.8 crore, if one goes by the excess of exports over imports shown in Indian customs records. The tax burden most heavily increased in what were called the Mahalwari areas, where land tax was not fixed, as was the case in the Permanently Settled and Madras Ryotwari areas.
In real terms, between 1819 and 1856, taxation in Mahalwari areas (present U.P., excluding Awadh, and parts of Central India) increased by 70 per cent. We must remember that this area constituted the heart of the rebellion: the one from where the Bengal sepoys – mostly Hindustani peasants in uniform – came, and where the rebellion enjoyed the widest support.
The second factor to be taken account of was the development of what is now called the Imperialism of Free Trade. English industrial manufactures, after the Charter Act of 1833, entered India practically free of duty. This meant that Indians, particularly spinners and weavers, were thrown out of employment as more than a quarter of the total textile consumption of India was now met by imports from Britain.
Almost one-fifths of the territory of India was added to British control during these years [1843 to 1856]. Each annexation resulted in huge unemployment as people employed by the older regimes – dependants of the princely courts, and artisans for example – were deprived of their livelihood.
Finally, Imperialism of Free Trade demanded a considerable contribution in blood.
The Bengal Army, the largest modern army in Asia, had over 135,000 Indian (‘native’) soldiers trained in modern methods of warfare. It was the main army of British imperialism at the time. The sepoys fought and died in wars in Afghanistan, Sind, Punjab, Burma, Crimea, China and Iran, sustaining heavy casualties year after year.
This naturally put a very heavy strain on the morale of the Bengal Army and on the loyalty of its sepoys to their paymasters. In a sense, all the tensions that imperialism or colonialism was generating came to be concentrated in a dramatic form in the very instrument which it had forged for its own purposes.… The British wanted literate and disciplined soldiers, so they concentrated on recruiting Brahmins for their main arm, the infantry, and this increased the element of caste sensitivity within the Bengal Army.
The Bengal Army had little …intrinsic sympathy with the old regimes. The sepoys revolted on the immediate issue of greased cartridges, an issue most important for the Brahmins, who were naturally more conscious of caste and ritual purity than other elements in the Army. Yet it would be a mistake to suppose that since the sepoys rose to defend their “dharm” or “deen” (religion), they were tied down to any theocratic perceptions or anti-modern prejudices.
The sepoys were greatly familiar with modern methods of military organisation and leadership, and, as noted, had no connection with the ‘feudal’ classes. An important feature of the Bengal Army was that Hindus and Muslims were put together in the same units.… After the Revolt broke out, the sepoys began to elect their own officers. It is astonishing that on many occasions largely Hindu contingents elected Muslim officers and, similarly, contingents with a largely Muslim composition chose Hindus as their officers.
In the debate on whether 1857 was or was not a “mutiny”, one should not overlook the crucial role of the sepoys in the Revolt. They were the core of the rebellion, its armed element, its most steadfast component. This is what made the rebellion of 1857 the biggest anti-colonial revolt in the world, [bringing to] the field over 120,000 professional soldiers of the kind that the Bengal Army sepoys put into battle.
DEMOCRATIC SENTIMENTS
Of particular significance is the republican or democratic sentiments of the Bengal Army sepoys. Where they formed representative bodies, they chose to call them ‘councils’, and elected their peers. In Delhi, they acknowledged the titular emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, but actually constituted a ‘Court of Administration’ consisting of the representatives of different rebel contingents to administer Delhi.
Another thing to mark is that despite the criticism of the sepoys’ conduct in Delhi in British accounts, it is remarkable that during the four months of rebel control in Delhi (there are newspapers and documents belonging to this phase in the National Archives), the amount of misconduct by the sepoys was limited. …Contrast this with what happened after the British occupation. There was mass slaughter and plunder of the people. In contrast, throughout the rebellion, the conduct of sepoys was exemplary considering the circumstances.
There were three newspapers, issued weekly, during that time, two in Urdu and one in Persian. Delhi Urdu Akhbar, the major paper, strongly argued that the English rulers were foreigners and drew away wealth from India. The paper always addressed its readers as ‘fellow countrymen’ and called the rebel army fauji Hindustani or the Indian Army. The paper’s hero was Bakht Khan, the ‘republican’-minded commander-in-chief in Delhi.
Delhi Urdu Akhbar pleaded that people should obtain skill and manufacture rifles. It demanded a restoration of the postal services under the aegis of the rebels. In his proclamation of August 1857, Feroz Shah, a noted rebel leader, said that the rebels would develop both steamboats and railways.
Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru in The Discovery of India characterises the rebellion of 1857 as basically a feudal uprising. This is true only insofar as many of the major leaders of the uprising were either princes or zamindars and some of these rendered outstanding contributions to the Revolt.
For example, Kunwar Singh and Amar Singh, the two zamindars of Jagdishpur, …the Rani of Jhansi Rani Lakshmi Bai, and Hazrat Mahal of Lucknow, who so stoutly resisted the British. There was Khan Bahadur Khan, a zamindar of Bareilly, who was ultimately hanged. Bahadur Shah Zafar partly atoned for his early hesitation and ultimate surrender through his post-1857 verses in which he so movingly mourns the rebel dead.
It is also to be observed that when taluqdars, zamindars and princes went into rebellion against the greatest colonial power of the world, the exigencies of popular resistance inevitably imposed changes in their visions and attitudes.
EARLY APPEALS
In the early appeals, traditional notions are in evidence, with promises to re-establish the old feudal hierarchies once the English are defeated. In time, these sentiments disappear from rebel proclamations. When, finally, the rebels from the camp of Hazrat Mahal issued their reply to Queen Victoria’s Proclamation of November 1857, all these matters were forgotten. It is the Indian people who are in the forefront. “The Army and people of India” are told not to believe Queen Victoria and her Proclamation, which is so full of fraud and deception.
A veil should not be drawn on what the British did, however undiplomatic it may be for us to raise this question. What happened to the Indian people after the rebellion broke out and was suppressed cannot be erased from the pages of history.
As J.W. Kaye put it in his classic History of the Sepoy War, “An Englishman is almost suffocated with indignation when he reads that a Mrs. Chamber or Miss Jinnings was hacked to death by a dusky ruffian; but in native histories it may be recorded that mothers, wives and children with less familiar names fell miserable victims to the first swoop of English vengeance, and these stories may have as deep a pathos as those that rend our own hearts.”
MASSACRE IN DELHI
The massacre in Delhi is described in a large number of memoirs that exist and in British reports. The whole city was depopulated and subjected to massacre. The slaughter went on for days. If the rebels killed the English in hundreds, the English killed in tens of thousands. Which Briton was ever brought to face retribution for killing hundreds of ordinary Indians, men, women and children? How can we treat the two as at par?
Therefore, when our statesmen speak of the good things that happened under British rule, like the establishment of the Indian Civil Service, they should think sometimes of 1857, not only of the rebels but also of the ordinary citizens – men, women and children – who were shot or hacked to death or killed by various means, under the aegis of our great praiseworthy benefactors.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.