Congress leader Shashi Tharoor has been in the news for quite a few days for his epic takedown on the British Raj. In several hard-hitting speeches, Shashi Tharoor has made it clear that India owes nothing to Britain and the Brits should apologise to India for carrying out atrocities in the colonial rule. This time Shashi Tharoor has hit back at Britain again while asserting that India need not be grateful to the British for the railways while adding that they built it for their own purpose.
In a video, Shashi Tharoor said that the British East India Company back then thought that the Railways would be “beneficial for the commerce, government and military control of the country” and that the from the very beginning it wad clear that they were constructing railways for their own purpose.
“Everyone thinks that the British gave us Railways, shouldn’t we be grateful. We don’t realise that the railways was a very big colonial scam. The purpose of the Raliways was to serve the British to extract goods, minerals, raw materials from the Indian hinterland which were hitherto inaccessible,” Tharoor said.
“To send soldiers there, get the labour to move and get these goods out of the hinterland… That was the first purpose,” he added. Tharoor further said that it was the Indian taxpayers who paid for the entire construction of railways but it was the British who enjoyed the profits.
Speaking of racism in the railways, Tharoor said, “Indian passengers were not their priority. They had horrendous third class carriages with wooden benches but they charged the highest passenger rates in any railway in the world. Whereas the British companies who were shipping freight on the railways, paid the lowest freight rates anywhere in the world. It was only after the Independence that we started reversing these practices.”
Recently, he also urged people to sign a petition seeking an apology from the British for the atrocities carried in India.
You can watch the entire video here:
