Colonials and Indians
We can only hope that India's decision to openly side with the imperialists will make it even clearer what path the ruling classes are taking

Reza Fiyouzat
Ocotber 4, 2005
iranian.com

The era of wars without frontiers seems to be getting even more bizarre. The fact that the successive administrations of George W. Bush have stirred back to dominance recessive colonialist genes is a given. But, stranger mutations are taking place, too. It must be all the uranium dust that is flying around the globe; thanks to all the hundreds upon hundreds of tonnage of uranium-enriched munitions piercing Iraqi and Afghan life so perniciously that manufacturers are busting inventories and leaving the U.S. is in need of importing munitions from Israel.

We are referring to the decision made by the Indian government, led by Prime Minister Singh of the Congress Party, to vote for the US-backed European-written edict to ‘refer’ the Iranian regime to the Security Council for not complying fully enough with the extortionist policies of the Western imperialists.

This move by the Indian government has been domestically criticized heavily by both the Communists and the Left, as well as by the right wing, Hindu-oriented Bharathiya Janath Party (BJP). From Colony to a Colonialist-wannabe? Is that what is happening? Or, is it a mere case of bribery?

Of course, the Indian government, deploying the mandated Double-Speak learned very quickly, would have you believe that they voted ‘Yes’ for the resolution, bearing in mind the best interests of Iran! Why, you’d never know what extremities those crazy Yanks and the Euros would get up to had it not been for the moderating influence of India. The Indian government’s decision, we would be told, most definitely had nothing to do with galactic-sized bribes such as a special backstage pass for the Nuclear Club, and promises of a likely OK for India’s bid to be seated at the UN Security Council permanently!

Oh, the gall! The gall, and now the sharing in the European-generated racist assumptions that the peoples of the Third World are such stupid idiots that they cannot see the deceit and the outright treachery against them taking place in broad daylight!!

Praful Bidwai, commenting on the ‘objections’ the Indian government brought up against the original draft of the resolution, and the supposed concessions that India allegedly extracted from the Europeans and the US, has written, “‘These objections pertain to the very substance of the motion and warranted at least abstention from, if not opposition to, the vote,’ says Hamid Ansari, India’s former ambassador to Iran and a West Asia expert, who has closely followed the IAEA’s debate on Iran. Yet, India went along with the “yes” vote on the plea that it had persuaded the EU-3 to modify its original tough resolution,” (India Ditches Iran and Nonalignment, on Anti-War.com, September 28, 2005).

This is an outright lie, as explained by Bidwai, since, “India’s decision to vote with the U.S. was taken even before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit in mid-September to France and the U.S., where he met President George W. Bush. The Hindu newspaper disclosed on Sept. 17 that New Delhi had already decided to vote in that manner if it came to the crunch.”

India’s relations with Iran have had their historical twists. A former Shah of Iran, Nader Shah (also written as Nadir Shah), who apparently was not a very nice man, some long time ago, in 1738 AD, invaded and occupied India for some months, plundered it thoroughly and massacred many thousands of Indians very horribly, and brought back with him the Peacock Throne, the very symbol of the Iranian monarchy.

According to the Wikipedia entry for this gentle soul, “The plunder seized from India was so rich that Nadir [Shah] stopped taxation in Iran for a period of three years, following his triumphant return.” George W. Bush, top that!Pakistan being a British colonial invention, back then we were neighbors with India, and one could say that Nader Shah’s rude behavior constituted the first episode of not-good-neighborly behavior on our part.

Fast forward to some time later, when the British were India’s colonial overlords, and using her resources to the maximum. Taxes collected in India paid off British debts to the Dutch bankers, and naturally the slave labor provided by the Indian workers and soldiers made the running of the empire that much more bearable for the British. The town where some of us were born in was one of the places, where Indian manpower was used in the service of Her Majesty the Queen, the Sovereign of all lands where night was supposedly never seen.

The city of Abadan is in the southwest corner of Iran, at the northwest extremity of Persian Gulf. The town has a unique history and its oil workers have played a pivotal role in labor unrests that have proved crucial in key political battles in Iran. The city lies just on the border with Iraq, in the province of Khuzestan, where most of the oil in Iran rests, and one of the first places where the British penetrated.

Abadan is a microcosm. Its history, down to its architecture is tightly woven with oil and colonial designs. The city has two distinct sections: the ‘Old’ section and the ‘Oil Co.’ part. The old part is the remnants of what the Abbasid dynasty built and developed into a successful port city in the 8th century AD. In the early years of the 20th century, the old section was a peaceful, idyllic fishing and date-farming village, free from modern history’s turbulence and violent currents.

The Oil Co. part of the city is a classic company town built by the British, between 1909 and 1913, thus securing themselves a steady supply of fuel that would stoke the fires of World War I. The centerpiece of this company town was, naturally, the oil refinery. In later years, a petrochemical plant was added, a mere hundred meters from a school I attended. The refinery boasted being the third largest facility in the world pumping out black gold; and black fumes in proportion to shipped barrels per day.

The British efficiency was evident all right. The refinery was geographically in the middle, and all the residential areas were so built as to make the workers’ trip to work possible in the shortest amount of time; workers of each section would live closest to the gate that led to their work section. The refinery was expansive and therefore never too far off as we went shopping, went to school, to hospitals and clinics when sick, as we played, went to sports clubs, or to social clubs. All of which schools, clubs, hospitals and clinics, and sports facilities followed closely the British liking for everything class-based; management had its own, engineers had their own, and workers of different ranks all had their own separate facilities.

To get back to the Indian connection, there was a neighborhood, in one section of the Oil Co. part of the city, which was called “Sikh Lane.” We did not know or suspect, when growing up, but later as young adults we were told that the so-named neighborhood, at one point, used to house Indian technicians and soldiers (presumably mostly Sikhs, hence the name of the neighborhood?), whom the British colonialists had brought to carry out the technical duties and protect them against us the local savages. The very older Iranian generations still alive, may even remember the days when Iranian locals were not allowed to enter certain neighborhoods in the Oil Co. part of Abadan; which neighborhoods were exclusive to the British managerial and diplomatic classes, or other visiting Europeans who may have been invited to behold the British bluster and swagger.Fast forward to nowadays.

Back in June 2003, it was reported that the US was asking India to send more than 17,000 troops to participate in the sacking of Iraq (see, Washington presses India to send troops to Iraq, World Socialist Web Site, June 30, 2003). At the time, this would have been more than what the British were sending to Iraq, and would have put the number of Indian troops second only to the US’s.Back then, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, of the right wing Hindu chauvinist BJP, who was and is very friendly with the Bushes, did not give in to the US pressure, and was in fact forced to reflect the popular sentiment of the Indian people in declaring the military invasion of Iraq as lacking justification.

So, this time around, obviously the size of the bribes offered by the US and the Europeans must have been pretty substantial. Substantial enough to do two things. First, to offset possible economic retaliation by Iran by scrapping any lucrative gas or other deals. And, to offset the real revulsion of the party base and the consequent loss of real political power for the party of Gandhi; the party that led the Indian nation to liberation from colonialism, the party that co-organized the Bandung Conference, and co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement, thus giving the Third World an institutionally-based independent political voice.And this makes us shudder. So, what is the next step for India?

Are we indeed facing a new machinery of colonization and plunder whose gears will be oiled mostly by the blood of the colonized subjects; again? Only this time the colonized subjects step forward voluntarily to serve the master?And it also makes some of us shudder for we wonder: will Indian soldiers be assigned to locations in Iran and the Middle East? Would Indian ruling classes be fooled into thinking they will re-write their past by sending their boys to occupy again those abandoned housing units in Abadan’s Sikh Lane, only this time not as slave technicians and soldiers but as volunteered paid mercenaries sacrificed to the Gods of neo-liberal imperialism?

These are very sad days indeed for India. We can only hope that this move by their government to openly side with the imperialists will make it even clearer what path the Indian ruling classes are taking, and to see a re-awakening of the outrage of the Indian people and the working classes whose standards of living, down to their very water, is being sold off to private, profit-seeking companies.

Let us work for a re-awakened voice of the Third World, the South, the neo-slaves of this new world order. And let it be told that in this new world order, the North and South are not geographical designations any more, but designations of power (or lack of it), and New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is the proof of that statement.

About
Reza Fiyouzat is an applied linguist/university instructor, and a freelance writer. Visit his blog, Revolutionary Flowerpot Society.