Destruction

Dr Shashi Tharoor and RT’s Runjhun Sharma draw a sharp line between Trump’s tariffs today and the colonial tariffs Britain once imposed in India - tariffs that crushed India’s world-class textile industry. Before the British arrived, India produced nearly 27% of global textile exports. By 1947 that number had collapsed to just 2%. Dr Tharoor also brings up a British counter-argument: that India “missed the bus” of the Industrial Revolution. His answer is - India didn’t miss the bus, “you threw us under its wheels.” In fact, British cloth flooding the Indian market resulted in Indian nationalists urging people to boycott imported goods and support homegrown ones instead - known as Swadeshi movement.

The hosts explored other areas where Britain dismissed or suppressed Indian knowledge, like Ayurveda. Traditional medicine was sidelined and treated as inferior, while only British medicine was recognized as real. They also touch upon the institution of newspapers and censorship, with Dr Tharoor recalling a curious example of the East India Company expelling British editors for being too critical and shutting down local-language papers that dared to question colonial rule. When it came to education, Britain invested almost nothing. By the time of Independence, only 16% of Indians could read. Dr Tharoor further argues there was a deliberate effort to keep Indian thought and creativity suppressed.