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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

Everything traces back to colonialism - the incompetent people in charge today largely inherited their power from the colonial masters, mostly by being close to the colonists and being steeped in their traditions.

Power structures don’t disappear the moment a dominant power leaves a country. Power just shifts to their closest proxy at first.

It can take decades for the locals to vote/throw out these people and elect a government and build institutions that are more aligned with their local way of living.

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> Everything traces back to colonialism

How long will you keep blaming colonialism. Since you want someone to blame shouldnt you blame the natives who allowed a foreign power to rule over them because natives could be easily manipulated using divide and rule strategy.

even when after decades people muster courage and strength to throw them out, old colonial powers prop them up again thru colonial structures like the military. this has happened again and again in Pakistan. Another fact is Pakistan is paying the price not just for carbon emissions that happened last year, but for the emissions that have been happening since the industrial revolution. The very same industrial revolution that caused colonialism in the first place. It is double whammy for countries like Pakistan, all this is traced directly to colonialism - the floods, and the inability to cope with them.

How far advanced as a country do you think Pakistan would be without colonisation?

Before the British invasion of the Subcontinent, Pakistan was part of the Mughal empire and held the seat of power in Lahore. Colonization destroyed local institutions and created a servile mentality in the populace towards the Europeans, the shadow of which still hangs over the populace today. The scale of colonization and destruction did its part in "setting back" the country.

But neither was the Mughal empire indigenous to Pakistan. It was established when Mongol armies invaded the subcontinent from the North and took over the Delhi sultanate from the ruling Lodi Dynasty, and the newly founded Mughal empire imposed its own political system to replace that of the Lodis. How was this colonization and destruction of local institutions qualitatively different from that of the British?

Very different in terms of scale, industrialization... Mughals eventually settled into the culture of the region, mixed with the people. They are part of the fabric of the Subcontinent. British rule was qualitatively and quantitatively different.

The difference is in the intent. The British did not settle in India - they built it as a colony and thus, every institution was set up to extract wealth and send it back to the home country. The Mughals, for all their faults, came as settlers. The institutions they set up were not meant to merely exploit and send resources back to another country; the wealth stayed right there, locally.

The fact that there are so few Indians/Pakistanis of English lineage despite 200 years of rule should tell you the intent of the British rule - the land and its people were merely seen as places to exploit, not as places to settle. They were essentially tourists.

In 1857, where do you think the British got the troops to sack Delhi from?

Everything?

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