Pakistan is a paradigm example of a failed state that has undergone an extremely dangerous form of radical Islamisation.
Warren Hastings
Hastings, Warren (1732-1818) Governor (1772-1774) and Governor General
(1774-1785) of the fort william in Bengal. Warren Hastings abandoned the policy
of hesitation of his predecessors about the question of establishing political
dominance in India, and bringing about a series of reforms and waging wars
against the challengers to his expansionist plan and conquering new lands. He
laid the foundation of British power in India. But his contributions did not
refrain parliament from impeaching him under manifold charges including
corruption, oppression and unauthorised wars. He was recalled in 1785 and tried
in parliament, but ultimately acquitted.
Warren Hastings was born at Churchill in Oxfordshire on 6 December 1732. His
family was in reduced circumstances so he was brought up by an uncle, who took
him to London and in 1743 sent him to school at Westminster, where he proved to
be an excellent scholar. On leaving school he obtained a junior appointment in
the east india company's Bengal service. He arrived at Calcutta in September
1750.
Hastings's first appointment was at kasimbazar, a major centre for procuring
silk. He was at Kasimbazar in 1756 when Nawab sirajuddaula was provoked to
attack and storm Calcutta, rounding up the British at Kasimbazar in the process.
On his release Hastings joined the British refugees from Calcutta. He married
one of them, Mary, widow of an officer who had been killed at Calcutta. Neither
the first Mrs Hastings nor the two children that she bore her husband were to
live long.
From 1758 Hastings served as the company's Resident at murshidabad with the
new nawab, mir jafar, in whose favour the British had intervened at Palashi. In
1760 a coup engineered by the British brought down Mir Jafar and replaced him
with another nawab, mir qasim. Shortly afterwards, Hastings went down to
Calcutta and succeeded to the council that managed the company's affairs under a
new governor, henry vansittart. Hastings allied with the governor in disputes
that split the council about the extent to which the nawab should be permitted
to regulate the private trade of British merchants. Hastings and Vansittart
favoured conciliation. Tensions with the nawab, however, erupted into armed
conflict and Mir Qasim was driven out of Bengal. Vansittart resigned his
governorship and returned to Britain. In January 1765 Hastings followed him.
In Britain Hastings sought to influence future Indian policy and to secure
his return with a prestigious position. In 1768 he was appointed second in the
council of the settlement at Fort St George, Madras.
Hastings spent two successful years at Madras. His management of the
company's commercial concerns was particularly commended. In 1771 the directors
of the East India Company, looking for a new governor of Bengal, chose Hastings.
He returned to Calcutta on 17 February 1772.
Appointment as a Governer
Hastings saw himself in 1772 as governor of what he regarded as a province
now fully part of the British empire. He dismissed formal acknowledgements of
Mughal authority over Bengal as harmful fictions. He had orders to assert the
company's direct authority over a government that had been largely delegated to
Indian officials. He complied with alacrity. He had no qualms about making
further incursions into areas of government allocated to the nawabs. He believed
that sovereignty, a concept that he frequently invoked, was vested in the
'British nation' and that there must be no equivocation about that.
Hastings shared the view, universal among contemporary Europeans, that Bengal
was a naturally rich province with a highly productive agriculture and skilled
manufacturers that had suffered from misgovernment under its later Indian rulers
and during the British take-over. It had been afflicted in 1770 by a very severe
famine. The new regime's task was to enable recovery to take place. In the years
after 1772 Hastings developed a distinctive point of view on how this should be
done. He believed that Bengal must be governed in ways to which its people were
presumed to be accustomed. Indian methods of government and Indian law must be
preserved. The British should aim 'to rule this people with ease and moderation
according to their own ideas, manners, and prejudices'.
Revenue was the central issue of early British government in India. The
British were uncertain as to how much they could extract from the province
without inflicting damage on it. In 1772 Hastings decided that the best way of
finding out what Bengal could afford to pay was to invite competition for the
right to collect revenue for a period of five years. Where the existing
zamindars or hereditary revenue managers, did not make adequate offers, higher
bids would be accepted. This so-called 'farming' system was adjudged even by
Hastings to have been a failure. For the rest of Hastings's administration the
company negotiated revenue assessments year by year, usually with the zamindars.
As diwan of Bengal after 1765, the company acquired responsibility for
administering civil justice, cases of property and inheritance being closely
involved with the payment of revenue. Criminal justice was the concern of the
nawab, who enforced the Islamic criminal law. Hastings believed that the British
must intervene to restore a decayed system of indigenous justice. He created new
hierarchies of courts, both civil and criminal, under British supervision. The
law administered by the courts was to be the law already in force in Bengal.
Hastings set about obtaining translations that would make this law accessible to
those Europeans who had to administer it.
As governor of Bengal, Hastings had not only to direct the internal
administration of a huge province, but he had to conduct complex diplomacy with
Indian states and on occasions with other European powers. By the 1770s it was
impossible for the British in Bengal or in their other settlements at Madras and
Bombay to isolate themselves from the new order of states that was replacing the
Mughal empire. Hastings had no ambition to make new conquests, but he was
strongly in favour of seeking influence by alliances. His ideal of peaceful
influence over allies bore little relation, however, to the way events were to
unfold. The company was to be repeatedly drawn into war, beginning with a war
against the Rohillas in 1774 fought to strengthen the company's major ally in
northern India, the nawab-wazir of Oudh in whose territory British troops were
maintained.
In 1773 the national government in Britain intervened to impose reforms on
the East India Company. Authority in Bengal was to be concentrated in a governor
general and a new Supreme Council of five. A Supreme Court, staffed by royal
judges, was also to be established in Calcutta. Hastings was chosen as the first
governor general, but three men, John Clavering, George Monson and philip
francis, were sent out to join the council directly from Britain.
The three new councillors from Britain began an unremitting opposition to
Hastings immediately after their arrival in Calcutta on 19 October 1774. Acting
together, they constituted a majority. They quickly professed to find corruption
behind every policy of the old government and to believe that Hastings was
allowing the resources of Bengal to be plundered and wasted. Francis, an
intellectual of a calibre to match Hastings, was a particularly formidable
opponent of the governor general.
The new councillors began by denouncing the war against the Rohillas.
Hastings's revenue policy was also condemned and Indians were encouraged to
bring accusations of personal corruption against him. The leading accuser was
maharaja nanda kumar, who evidently calculated that he stood to gain ample
rewards were the new councillors to displace Hastings. His accusations of
bribe-taking were probably much exaggerated, but it is likely that Hastings had
received some irregular payments. Before anything could be proved, charges of
forgery were brought against Nanda Kumar in the new Supreme Court. He was found
guilty, sentenced to death and executed on 5 August 1775. Critics of Hastings
from his own time onwards have drawn the not unreasonable inference that he
promoted the prosecution and may have influenced the verdict. What can be
established is that the prosecution against Nanda Kumar was promoted by his
Indian enemies with the encouragement of Hastings's friends.
Hastings recovered control over the government as two of his opponents,
Monson and Clavering, died, leaving Francis alone to carry on the opposition
against Hastings. After fighting a duel against Hastings on 17 August 1780, in
which he was slightly wounded, Francis finally left India.
Hastings remained in office until 1785. War was the main source of the
difficulties that he faced in his last years. From 1778 the British were
fighting the Marathas. In 1780 the formidable armies of Mysore invaded the
Carnatic territory which was under the protection of the British. In January
1781 the first French expeditionary force arrived in India to support Mysore.
Hastings took credit for the diplomacy that broke up the formidable Indian
coalition opposing him and for sending money, supplies and troops on a very
large scale from Bengal to Madras, thus enabling the Mysore forces to be pushed
back and the French to be contained. With some justification, Hastings saw
himself as the saviour of the British empire in India. Nevertheless, the scale
of the wars did Hastings great damage with opinion in Britain. He was accused of
being a warmonger with a lust for conquest that had landed the company in
ruinously expensive wars.
The needs of the war were the cause of some very contentious dealings by
Hastings with the company's dependants and allies in northern India. Chait
Singh, the raja of Benares, was required to pay an increased subsidy to the
company. On the pretext that he was evading legitimate demands, Hastings
proposed to exact a large fine from him on a personal visit in 1781. The raja's
retainers resisted and forced Hastings to flee from the city.
Although British authority was quickly restored, the episode left a strong
impression that Hastings had acted tyrannically as well as subjecting himself to
needless risks. From Benares Hastings went on to try to raise extra funds from
the company's ally the nawab of Oudh by forcing him to resume alienation of land
revenue and to confiscate a large hoard of treasure in the possession of his
mother and grandmother, the Begums of Oudh. Again, Hastings appeared to have
acted with a ruthless high-handedness.
Throughout his governorship, Hastings was a generous patron of the arts and
of learning. He took a particular pride in the translation of the Bhagavat Gita
made by charles wilkins, for which he wrote a memorable preface. His interests
laid the foundations for the creation of the Bengal Asiatick Society (now
asiatic society) of 1784.
In February 1785, in failing health, Hastings resigned his office. He landed
in England on 13 June 1785, after an absence of over sixteen years. He had not
unreasonable expectations of acclaim and honours on his return, but he was in
fact to meet attacks that culminated with his being put on trial. The trial
began in 1788 and lasted until he was acquitted in 1795.
Unfortunately for Hastings, Edmund Burke, whose revulsion against what he saw
as gross misgovernment in British India had focused on Hastings, was not
prepared to let him go. Burke had undoubtedly fallen under the influence of
Philip Francis after his return to Britain in 1780, but he had formed his own
views about India and he was driven by a passionate concern for justice. He
believed that the East India Company was laying India waste by rapacious
policies within its own provinces, by the exploitation of its allies and by its
wars. He held Hastings to be responsible for all this. In 1786 Burke produced
charges for an impeachment to be voted by the House of Commons and then to be
heard by the House of Lords. The first charge, which related to the Rohilla war,
was thrown out by the Commons, but the second, on Hastings's dealings with the
raja of Benares, was passed, as were others introduced in the 1787 session of
Parliament. On 10 May 1787 Hastings was formally impeached.
Huge crowds attended the early sessions of the trial that was regarded as a
great public spectacle. But by 30 May 1791, when the prosecution closed their
case, few could doubt that the tide was running in Hastings's favour. In a new
climate of opinion with a more assertive British nationalism in reaction to the
French Revolution, empire came increasingly to be seen as part of Britain's
greatness rather than as a cause of shame. Hastings's claims to have been the
saviour of empire were therefore viewed sympathetically. In 1795, when the Lords
gave judgement, in every case a large majority voted 'not guilty'.
The stark legal alternatives of 'guilty' or 'not guilty' are an inappropriate
basis for any assessment of a career as complex as Hastings's. It is impossible
to endorse Burke's extravagantly vituperative abuse of him. Few would now
believe that he deserved impeachment let alone being found guilty. On the other
hand, the argument that he had no significant case to answer, beyond some minor
blemishes committed in a good cause and was the victim of Francis's envy and
Burke's malice is not sustainable. Strictly within the terms argued out in the
impeachment, Hastings was vulnerable to accusations of high-handedness in
Benares and Oudh and he had accumulated a fortune by methods that the new
official morality of the late eighteenth century did not sanction.
Any assessment of him on terms that go beyond those of the Impeachment must
recognise Hastings's exceptional qualities of mind, he brought a creative
intelligence of a very high order to Indian government. He also showed an
appreciation of Indian culture and a regard for individual Indian people most
unusual in any British official in high office at any time. Partly in reaction
to him, future British administration in India would be more closely bound by
rules and more distant from Indians.
After his acquittal in 1795, Hastings lived for another 23 years. His life
was that of a country gentleman, engaged in local affairs and farming the
ancestral family estate that he had been able to recover. Public employment
never came again, but at least in the last years of his life, he was treated
with much respect and received some public recognition. He died on 22 August
1818 in his 85th year.
Death of Madhava Rao Peshwa
1737 saw the death of the Peshwa brothers, Baji Rao and Chimaji.Baji Rao's
son, Balaji Bajirao (Nanasaheb) succeeded as the Peshwa. The three brothers
Nanasaheb, Sadashivrao and Raghunathrao continued the able rule of Peshwa for
the next 25 years. The 1761 Panipat battle, between Marathas and Ahmad Shah
Abdalli, destroyed both Abdalli and Peshwas. Though Marathas won the war, they
had to face a hard blow when they lost Sadashivrao and Nanasaheb Peshwa's eldest
son. Nanasaheb died grief-striken in the same year. His second son Thorale
Madhav Rao assumed the title. And his uncle Raghunath Rao acted as his care
taker.
Madhavrao Peshwa defeated Haider Ali of Mysore and Nizam of Hyderabad. In
1769, Marathas lead by Mahadaji Shinde, headed the North India campaign. They
defeated the Jats and took hold of Agra and Mathura. They reinstated the Mughal
Emperor on the throne, who was living on the East India Company Pension.
After Madhav Rao Peshwa's death in 1772, Raghunathrao's attempts to be the
Peshwa were foiled by the ministers. Hurt, he joined the British. The state came
under the rule of ministers headed by Nana Phadnavis and Mahadaji Shinde.
