The Bible Created the ‘Steel Frame’ of India
by Vishal Mangalwadi, Samuel Davidson and Ishita Davidson Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (1875–1955), India’s first Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, described the colonial Civil Services as “The Steel Frame of India.” Who or what built that frame? The short answer is: the Bible. Between 1765 and 1820, British rulers were as corrupt as today’s Indian civil servants. Most Indians feel that our criminal politicians use civil servants to loot our tax money and extract bribes from helpless citizens. Now they are also using the police to persecute political opponents and religious minorities. Why then did Patel, India’s “Iron Man,” describe colonial-era civil services as the “steel frame” of justice and fairness that held India together? Vallabhbhai Patel, who fought against the British Raj, praised civil servants on 21 April 1947 at Metcalf House in Delhi. He argued that after independence, the Indian Civil Services (ICS), created by colonial rulers, should continue serving the new nation. Its name would change from ICS to IAS (Indian Administrative Services). Patel’s phrase “the steel frame” came from a 1922 speech by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Management guru Peter Drucker described colonial civil services as a model of public administration and management. It was the reason, he asserted, that colonialism survived for two centuries. Many of its cadre were sons of British pastors. Their parents and churches prayed that these young men would serve India with diligence and integrity. Their prayers were answered. Drucker does not defend colonialism. He knew that the British Raj was marked by muddled policies, indecision, misdirection, and failures. It survived for as long as it did because the Bible-based Evangelical movement built the Indian Civil Services. The ICS, says Drucker, was Britain’s “supreme administrative accomplishment”: [The Civil Servants] were younger sons of poor country parsons, with no prospects at home and little standing in English society. Their pay was low, and such opportunities for loot or gain as their predecessors had enjoyed in the swashbuckling days of the East India Company a hundred years earlier had, by 1860, been completely eliminated by both law and custom. These untrained, not very bright, and totally inexperienced youngsters ran districts comparable in size and population to small European countries. And they ran them practically all by themselves with a minimum of direction and supervision from the top. Some, of course, became casualties and broke under the strain, falling victim to alcohol, to native women, or—the greatest danger of them all—to sloth. But most of them did what they were expected to do and did it reasonably well. They gave India, for the first time in its long and tragic history, peace, a measure of freedom from famine, and a little security of life, worship, and property. They administered justice impartially and, at least as far as they themselves were concerned, honestly and without corruption. They collected taxes by and large, impartially and equitably. They did not make policy, and in the end, they foundered because they had none. But they administered, and administered well. (Peter Drucker. Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, pp. 403-404. Emphasis added.) Robert Clive, a clerk in the Madras office of the East India Company, laid the foundations of the British Raj in 1757 by defeating Bengal’s Nawab, Siraj-ud-Daulah. Clive supported the appointment of the new Nawab, Mir Qasim, who ruled until 1763. In 1762, Mir Qasim described British corruption in a letter to the Governor and his council. And this is the way your gentlemen behave; they make a disturbance all over my country, plunder the people, and injure and disgrace my servants… They forcibly take away the goods and commodities of the peasants, merchants, etc., for the fourth part of their value, and by way of violence and oppression, they oblige the peasants to give five rupees for goods which are worth but one rupee. (Philip Mason. The Men Who Ruled India. pp. 38-39) As mentioned earlier, seven decades later, one of Britain’s greatest historians, Lord Macaulay, confirmed Mir Qasim’s testimony regarding the corruption of British rulers. In his Essay on Clive, Macaulay wrote that the British East India Company was a “gang of public robbers” that “had spread terror through[out] the whole plain of Bengal.” Its governance was as “oppressive as the most oppressive form of barbarian despotism… strong with all the [military] strength of civilization. It resembled the government of evil Genii rather than the government of human tyrants.” The British Parliament denounced Clive as a corrupt “Nabob.” He was followed by Governor-General Warren Hastings, who expanded British rule in India. Hastings, too, was tried for corruption. During his trial, Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, put his finger on the root of a philosophical problem. Accusing the British East India Company, Burke said, “. . . these Gentlemen have formed a plan of Geographical morality, by which the duties of men in public and private situations are not to be governed by their relations to the Great Governor of the Universe or by their relations to men, but by climates, degrees of longitude and latitude…. As if, when you have crossed the equinoctial line, all the virtues die… as if there were a kind of baptism, like that practiced by seamen, by which they unbaptise themselves of all that they learned in Europe and commence a new order and system of things.” Burke’s charge was that in India, a corrupt East India Company was practicing a ‘Geographical’ or relative morality that was not governed by God’s moral (absolute) laws. In his influential work, The Men Who Ruled India, Philip Mason points out that this moral relativism was justified to maintain British rule and trade in India. Trade interests overruled God’s moral law. The Company presumed that “to be fair to Indians was to be prejudiced against the English.” Burke’s accusation, confirmed by Charles Grant and others, inspired British Evangelicals to reform the Company. Anglican Evangelicals were just beginning to emerge out of the Wesleyan revival of the late eighteenth century. They were
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