Pawan Khera

Britain has spent decades asking the world to admire its empire while refusing to acknowledge its damage. That is the oldest trick in imperial politics: take the wealth, and rewrite the theft as a gift. Suella Braverman’s latest intervention belongs squarely in that tradition. In her version of events, the ex-colonies owe Britain for the empire’s supposed “investment” and “development”.

The problem is not just that this is offensive. It is that it depends on selective memory. When a British-Indian politician suggests that former colonies should pay Britain back, she asks us to forget the scale of what the empire did to India. Before British rule hardened into domination, India accounted for roughly 23 percent of the world economy. By 1947, that share had fallen to around 4 percent. That collapse was not an accident of history. It was the outcome of a system built on extraction, loot and plunder.

The East India Company was the first instrument of this colonial system. It arrived as a trading corporation but rapidly transformed into an engine of extraction. Its model was simple: seize revenue, compel the cultivation of cash crops, dismantle indigenous industries, and redirect India’s agricultural and commercial surplus towards British economic and imperial interests.

The consequences were devastating. Peasants were subjected to relentless revenue demands that left little margin for drought, debt, or famine. Indigo cultivators were bound by coercive contracts that enriched European planters while impoverishing farming communities. Indian artisans and weavers, once among the world’s most skilled producers, were systematically displaced as British manufactured goods—backed by imperial policy and unequal trade—undercut indigenous industry.

India did not merely sustain the British empire at enormous human and economic cost, we also bore the brunt of Britain’s wars. During the First World War (1914-1918), over 1.3 million Indians served overseas or in support roles, including nearly 800,000 combat troops.

Around 75,000 Indian soldiers laid down their lives, while tens of thousands more were wounded or captured. India supplied Britain with food grains, horses and mules, cotton, jute, steel, leather, medical supplies and ammunition, and contributed £146 million—roughly 9 percent of India’s GDP—to finance Britain’s war effort. In return, it rewarded India with another three decades of colonial subjugation, political repression, economic exploitation and brutal crackdowns on the independence movement.

The injustice deepened during the Second World War (1939-1945). The Indian army in WW2 was the largest all volunteer army that the world has ever seen, rising from 200,000 men in 1939 to over 2.5 million men by 1945. And a very fine force it was too, with men of the Indian army (including British and Gurkha personnel) awarded 31 Victoria Crosses.

More than 87,000 were killed, around 65,000 wounded and nearly 80,000 taken prisoner. India became Britain’s wartime arsenal, supplying millions of tonnes of food, uniforms, boots, railway equipment, vehicles, ammunition, weapons and medical stores. It also spent approximately £350 million on defence and extended war credits worth £1.321 billion to Britain—equivalent to nearly 30 percent of India’s GDP.

Yet, while Indian blood and wealth sustained the British war machine, Britain repaid India with one of the darkest chapters in its history: the Bengal Famine, in which millions died while food continued to be diverted to imperial priorities; the chaotic and hasty Partition that displaced millions and left over a million dead; the legacy of communal division and conflict; and an impoverished nation stripped of its accumulated wealth after nearly two centuries of systematic extraction.

Britain did not leave India prosperous or prepared. It left behind a country exhausted by exploitation, fractured by imperial policy and burdened with rebuilding after nearly two centuries of colonial plunder. Yes, the British built railways, ports and administrative institutions—but not as gifts to India. They were instruments of the empire, designed to extract raw materials, move troops, tighten imperial control and funnel Indian wealth to Britain.  

That is the first great inversion in Braverman’s argument. She invites us to celebrate the infrastructure while forgetting the exploitation that made it possible—to remember the railways but not the revenue, the ports but not the peasants, the bureaucracy but not the artisans whose livelihoods were destroyed. The visible monuments of the empire are presented as evidence of benevolence, while the invisible machinery of dispossession, coercion and extraction that financed them is conveniently erased.

The political damage was no less deliberate. Britain understood early that a divided India was easier to govern than a united one. So it sharpened communal identities, institutionalised separate representation and rewarded politics that fractured rather than unified Indian society. Hindu-Muslim differences were not invented by the British, but colonial rule politicised and exploited these fractures. The result is splintering of the subcontinent and a deep-seated mistrust that has outlived the empire itself.

The contrast with the Mughals is important, though it should not be romanticised. Mughal rulers governed India as the centre of their empire, not as a distant colony to be exploited. Their legitimacy depended on the prosperity and stability of the subcontinent. Investment in architecture, patronage of artisans and textiles, and the cultivation of local alliances were not acts of charity; they were integral to sustaining an empire rooted in India.

The British Raj operated on an entirely different logic. It was an extractive colonial regime, structured around racial hierarchy and the transfer of wealth to Britain. Railways, ports, and administrative institutions were built primarily to facilitate imperial control, resource extraction, troop movement, and commercial interests. India was not the heart of the empire but one of its most valuable possessions.

That distinction is fundamental. The Mughal State accumulated wealth largely within India because India was its political and economic centre. The British Empire systematically transferred Indian wealth overseas because India was a colony. One empire sought legitimacy by embedding itself in the subcontinent; the other by governing it from a distance for metropolitan gain.

That is why the claim that Britain “developed” its colonies is such a grotesque inversion of history. Colonial “investment” was built on coerced extraction, not consent-based development. India financed the empire, underwrote British industrial growth and absorbed the human cost of Britain’s rise.

As such, the argument that former colonies should somehow repay Britain for these “investments” turns history on its head. If anything, it is Britain that owes a historical debt for the systematic exploitation of India’s people, resources, labour and wealth over nearly two centuries.

Jamaica and the Caribbean Community (Caricom) have transformed the case for reparations from a moral appeal into a coherent political programme. Their demands go far beyond symbolism, encompassing a formal apology, reparatory development financing, debt relief, investment in health and education, and the restitution of cultural heritage. This is not a politics of grievance, but a serious framework for historical justice.

India belongs within that broader conversation, albeit on its own terms. Unlike Caricom, New Delhi has not pursued a formal reparations claim, preferring moral argument over legal action and historical critique over diplomatic confrontation. That restraint, however, should not be mistaken for the absence of a claim. India was not a peripheral colony. It was the economic heart of the British Empire—the single-most important source of imperial wealth, revenue and extraction. If the logic of reparations applies anywhere, it applies with equal, if not greater, force to India.

If reparations are defensible for the Caribbean, they are at least as defensible for India. But India’s claim cannot be confined to monetary compensation alone. It should encompass a broader framework of historical justice: the restitution of looted artefacts, full archival transparency, a formal apology for colonial exploitation, and a fundamental reassessment of how the British empire is taught and remembered in Britain—not as a source of national pride, but as a project of conquest, extraction and domination.

The timing matters too. With Labour in government, Britain has a rare opportunity to confront its imperial past at the highest political level. Imperial nostalgia from Conservatives may be predictable. But when Labour MPs, Caribbean governments and voices across the Commonwealth are demanding reparative justice, the question becomes far more profound: can Britain finally acknowledge that the empire was not merely a story of railways, institutions, and trade, but also one of conquest, extraction and domination, long obscured by imperial mythmaking?

Braverman’s claim is useful only because it strips away the mask. It lays bare a strain of British imperial nostalgia that seeks to recast exploitation as benevolence and domination as development. That historical whitewashing must now be confronted—directly, honestly and without apology.

Pawan Khera | Member of Parliament and head of media and publicity department, AICC