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The FM has a plea: the West should despatch a 1,000 reincarnations of the East India Company to enslave India

In the repose of his one hundredth and first year, Nirad C Chaudhari should feel a little less lonely. He has, at long last, company -- in the shape of his forsaken country's current finance minister.

The finance minister, sworn in afresh earlier this month, is an ideologue with a long view. That apart, he both knows and speaks his mind. He had evidently a Euro-American audience as his target -- he used the occasion to deliver an apostrophe extolling the tremendous deeds of the East India Company.

As an Indian citizen, he, our finance minister, was overwhelmed by awe and admiration as he counted the myriad good things which that great company had done for us. For that ennobling mission, contemporary Indians, the minister implied, should remain ever beholden to the company. With folded hands and bent knees he has this stentorian plea to post to the West: let the misunderstandings of the intervening period be forgotten, the western powers must agree to despatch one thousand reincarnations of the EIC to take charge of India.

The finance minister has thrown a challenge to the historiology Indians have been accustomed to during the past century. The EIC, generations of Indian school children have been taught, was the other name for plunder and mayhem; this company looted India and squeezed it dry; because of its machinations, India was progressively de-industrialised, its agriculture shrivelled, and the country's overall rate of economic growth retrogressed throughout the late 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.

Once the British Crown took over from the company, the exploitation actually deepened. Most Indians were denied, as part of a purposive state policy, the opportunity of elementary education. Maternity care was non-existent, and Indian children died like flies in the post-natal phase. The rulers could not care less. The British trained a limited number of natives to serve as their minions. A comprador class emerged from this community of servitors, who did the masters's bidding. The overall quantum of India's primary production nosedived, even as the country's established industries, including handicrafts, were laid to ruins.

The rupee-sterling ratio was similarly manipulated to further imperial-colonial interests. Inevitably, the country's balance of payments was in a state of constant crisis, which facilitated the wholesale outflow of precious metals. The EIC hardly brought in any capital. Whatever paltry investments it undertook was to maximise the extraction and transportation, in the cheapest possible manner, of India's mineral wealth and primary products.

After a century of endeavour, Indians succeeded in getting rid of the British yoke, although a price had to be paid -- Partition. The stigma of the Plasssey battle, the ignominy of a teeny-weeny trading concern like the EIC, subjugating, with minimal effort, this nation of several hundred millions, with such a rich history going back to several 1,000 years, was finally obliterated.

This was the history Indian children were taught about the freedom movement.

The curriculum was faithfully repeated in the decades following Independence. A deviant like Nirad C Chaudhari espoused a different point of view; his cantankerous discourses had only a curiosity value. It was taken as a hallmark of the tradition of democratic tolerance. India has established that Chaudhari, who preferred to banish himself in Robert Clive's motherland, continued to be treated with deference by the nation he deserted.