When the Bolsheviks said ‘nyet’ |
THE landmark talks hosted last week by Pakistan between Iran and the US came at the head of a meandering colonial trail straddling two World Wars, game-changing assassinations, and countless coups, coupled with botched military campaigns to occupy foreign lands.
Mountstuart Elphinstone, Rudyard Kipling, and Lawrence of Arabia, in that order, plied Britain’s colonial time zones over a varied geographical stretch. But all three were on the same page with a singular mission of plunder, occasionally masked as Christian piety. At present, that fabled embrace of conquest is being reinstalled by Donald Trump and his followers. Elphinstone was the governor of Bombay when he expressed support for the Roman imperial mantra of divide et impera. Divide and rule would be the countermeasure to thwart future close calls revealed in the astounding Hindu-Muslim unity that underpinned the great Indian revolt of 1857.
Kipling, on his part, advanced a commitment to civilise “the half devil, half child” native of faraway lands. His poem romancing this Western mission was, in fact, a direct appeal to US president William McKinley against his dithering on the question of absorbing the Philippines into the US. When The White Man’s Burden was first published in a New York magazine in early 1899, it appeared with the subtitle The United States and the Philippine Islands. It became Kipling’s clarion call to action for the US to take control of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. He instructed Americans to “send forth the best ye breed” to undertake the task. Kipling was, in essence, telling........