 This is a video about soft power reparations. In March 2018, Rajiv Malhotra gave a speech to members of the British Parliament and made a very strong case for Britain to pay reparations to India. His concept of soft power reparations is both original and unique and is a perfect example of a strategy that would result in a win-win situation for India and Britain. Instead of the traditional request for monetary relief, he articulated the need for soft power reparations and explained how it would have a transformative effect of changing the grand narratives of British colonialism, highlight Indian contributions to Britain's heritage, promote mutual respect and propel future collaborative intellectual, technological, cultural and economic ventures between the two nations. Rajiv Malhotra also explained why he is not in favour of financial reparations. Money alone will not erase the deep psychological, political and physical imprints of British colonial rule. Malhotra's proposal for soft power reparations offers Britain an opportunity to acknowledge its debt to India. Also, Indians need to heal but not through resentment or fake narratives about their history and culture. Decolonisation requires a conscious effort by Indians to reclaim their educational system to not only reverse colonial discourses but also rebuild their technological, economic, intellectual and spiritual foundations. Before we listen to excerpts from Rajiv Malhotra's speech, let us first understand the purpose of reparations. What are reparations? Reparations have become the legal means to recognise and rectify past injustices against an individual, group or country. Reparations can take many forms. For example, the perpetrator may offer a formal apology to the victim. After apartheid ended in South Africa, for example, truth and reconciliation commissions were set up to bring closure by uncovering the atrocities committed. Reparations could come in the form of financial compensation. And a well-known example of this model is German reparations to the Israelis after World War II. Sometimes reparations come in the form of social and economic reforms to resolve issues that resulted from the crimes committed. Rajiv Malhotra's speech in the British Parliament is remarkable, not only because it includes a unique proposal for reparations but also because most former colonial powers avoid such discussions. Although many post-colonial nations have demanded reparations from their colonisers for past injustices, former colonial powers have consistently rejected such demands by questioning the legality of reparations. The common argument is that colonial rule was not illegal at the time it occurred and current governments cannot be held responsible. Let's listen to Rajiv Malhotra's speech at the British Parliament. It is important that we revive our narrative. When you look at Britain, Britain was beneficiary of a large part of Indian knowledge and Indian power because until, if you look at Cambridge history of world economics, it tells you that until 1750, India had about 25% of world GDP. And it says that the West, comprising of Europe and North America combined, had less than 20%. The rest was mainly China. So these are the three big slices. So what happened? And also, when you look at the early European scholars of India, they called themselves romanticists and they had a huge romance for India. So it's only later on, 100 years after this romantic period for India, that things became negative. So you can go back to these people and you have tremendous resources. I mean, they respected India's, you know, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, linguistics, botany, medicine, all kinds of stuff. And the East India Company really studied steel production in India. Dharampal has, the late Dharampal spent a lot of time in libraries in the UK to look at reports from the East India Company measuring steel production, quality of steel, cost of steel and so on. And even arguing why some of the Indian steel was better and cheaper and should be sent to UK. And some of the major construction projects requiring a lot of steel in Britain were with Indian steel. And Indian textiles, legendary. So if you look at the first two products that made the British Industrial Revolution successful, what are they? Textiles and steel. And what were some of the most important things the East India Company was engaged with in India is textiles and steel. So you see, we have to rethink history. We have to rethink history of what happened and to what extent Britain benefited, not just expropriating capital out of India and not just using it as a large captive market, but also in some of the knowledge transfer. And this knowledge transfer in those days, we did not have patents and intellectual property and we didn't have lawyers wanting royalty. So it didn't happen that way. When I speak to my American educators, one of the questions I ask is, why was Columbus looking for India? Hardly one out of a hundred will kind of tell me. They don't know what, you know. So I said he was not, he was not certainly going there to teach human rights. I mean, most Americans, you see, and the narrative of India I'm talking about is not like you got to do some new research and come up with new things. The dots exist, but they haven't been connected. So for example, the Arabs acknowledged and respected a whole lot of mathematics and astronomy coming out of India. In fact, many of the Arab texts start by giving the name of what text in Sanskrit or Malayalam that they are translating. And then, you know, 100 to 100 years later, some of these texts are translated to Latin. And then we know that they go from there to Northern Europe. And so people like Leibniz and Newton were not out in a vacuum. There were, for instance, the whole theory of infinite theories is very well known and respected by historians of mathematics, where it came from in India. The theory of infinitesimals, and these are all pre-calculus. These are all the foundations for which calculus is made. So we need to come up with a global history of how ideas have traveled. How ideas have traveled from West to East and East to West. And we're all human. It's a network. It's sort of like a very slow version of the Internet. Things didn't happen in milliseconds. They took a long time. Somebody had to go in a boat somewhere. But they did happen over a long period of time. And we have to acknowledge that. So all of this, connecting the dots and redeveloping a true history of India and India's soft power would be a very important thing that Britain can collaborate with Indian thinkers. And this would be something the Indian people would really, really appreciate as a tremendous gift coming back from Britain. And this, I think, is an important proposal I would like to leave. There is a proposal I do not agree with, which says that Britain should give financial reparations to India. Now this is not an original proposal. This is every few years some politician, some slick politician, comes up with this to get some applause. Because it's emotional. But let me tell you, and this has been around since Indira Gandhi's time. When I was in school, they used to talk about it. And we all kind of, wow, wow, wow, you know. But we must move forward in a win-win way, in a positive way where everybody wins and put the past behind us. We have to acknowledge the past. We have to write the correct history like I just described. We have to honor each other, help each other rebuild and reconstruct a positive grand narrative for ourselves. And then move forward into the future rather than us versus you, rather than anger, rather than kind of blame, kind of a mode. So the problem with this financial reparations issue is that it sort of says, you are guilty and I'm going to get you. It's punitive damages. It'll never happen. Let me just tell you, Britain will never give even a small amount of money as a symbolic thing and come up with some kind of, okay, we are guilty and we are ashamed and all that. It's not going to happen. So the rabble-rousing over-emotional bombastic people in India just looking for some instant populism. I would replace that with something far more important, far achievable, and I call it soft power reparations. That's a term I'm introducing for the first time today. What we should ask for is soft power reparations, not financial reparations. Soft power reparations means the narrative of India, what we teach in our textbooks, what Britain teaches in its textbooks, the ideas of history, these all to be said correctly, not exaggerated but said correctly. And this kind of intellectual exercise is just honesty. It's just a sign of being honest and it doesn't cost money. It just costs heart, just the heart in the right place. So I have a few ideas. First, I think this whole Aryan invasion theory needs to be dismantled. And this Aryan invasion theory was first, this was the early British orientalists never proposed such a theory. I mean, they were fond of Sanskrit. From William Jones onwards, they loved Sanskrit text, but never they said, you know, that we are some Aryans who brought it to you and all that stuff. It was never done. This happened later with Max Miller. He's the one who kind of fathered this theory and this was encouraged by Queen Victoria. But it was great news saying, wow, this is a discovery. If we brought civilization to them in the ancient days, we are just bringing more civilization now. So the Germans, what they got out of this Aryan theory is a sense of nationhood. That we, wow, we are the ancestors of all these great Sanskrit texts for we are a nation. That's why we are so great. So it built the German nation in terms of the German grand narrative. And of course, then Hitler took it into a different turn, which is a horrible thing, because he appropriated this idea for a very nasty purpose. So that's another reason to dismantle such a theory. What the British got out of it is saying, thank you, Max Miller, this is good, because while you guys get a sense of grand narrative for your nation, what we get is legitimization for the empire, because we can say, you know, this is like colonialism 2.0, because once before we went there as Aryans to civilize you anyway, then we didn't have cricket, but we brought you Sanskrit. And now we can give you cricket and we can give you English language, we can give you more. So this business that started in the 1800s needs to be dismantled. And if Britain were, if some good honest scholars with an open mind were to collaborate with their Indian counterparts and publish some works and we could have a few conferences, I would love for my foundation to have a partner here and do a Swadeshi Indology conference right here on this topic and set the record straight. You know, in World War I, 1.3 million Indian soldiers fought on the side of the Allies. More than the combined number of soldiers from all other countries put together. And there is no memorial to them in Britain. The same sort of statistics also for World War II. Now what a great soft power move it would be for the British government to say, let's work together and let's produce a real solid monument. It's not out of blame, anger, guilt or any of that stuff. But just to honor those people, 75,000 Indian soldiers died in World War I fighting on the British side. And another 70,000 were seriously injured. This is very high casualty. And let me also tell you this, many military historians feel that if it weren't for such a large number of brave Indians, Britain would probably have lost the war. And Britain would probably have, this means, ended up as a German colony. And today we would be sitting here speaking German. So this is pretty serious stuff. That a huge event twice in the 20th century, we, our community did. Our ancestors did this. Most of them Hindus. We did this. And they ought to be at least for emotional, psychological reasons. They ought to be in nice memorials some way. So this is another kind of an example of what I'm talking about. Very concrete soft power reparations. I believe that next year, April 19th, 2019 will be the 100th anniversary of the Jalyanwala Bagh massacre. That was a huge massacre that General Dyer ordered a peaceful gathering in Amritsar. And a large number of people were brutally killed, fired. What we also need to be ashamed of is that the actual bullets were fired by Indian Sipois. Indian Sipois killed their fellow Indians in very large numbers throughout the British time. And this Jalyanwala Bagh is not just a disgrace for one man, General Dyer, but also for all the Indians who sold out to do this dirty work. And we generally don't complain about these Sipois, but we should. Because the modern intellectuals who are colonized, who are bringing the same kind of anti-Indian grand narrative, are basically Sipois 2.0. That's who they are. They are the breaking India forces. So this business, so what could we do? So something positive could be done. We should have a conference or we should have something to kind of memorialize what happened 100 years ago. You know, in Germany they teach Holocaust and they teach it with a kind of knot that, you know, it's like it happened. We don't take ownership of it. Something in the past happened. It won't happen again. Let's move on. In the United States, there's a lot of white-black reconciliation where they teach slavery. It happened in a previous generation. It was a horrible thing to happen and we've now made sure it won't happen again. So having set the record, let's not have this undercurrents of anger and hatred and all that. Let's move on. Let's just move on together. I think it's time that the Indians got out of this old negativity towards the British. It's time that the British acknowledged what has happened. It's time that we worked together and that is what I'm calling soft power reparations. And the benefit will be we will move forward in a win-win way positively as collaborators. That's what I would like to happen. There are certain negative things that Britain should stop doing because these things were part of the old Indian elite, intellectual elite wanting these things. And those people have been thrown out and Britain should stop. For example, this whole overdone caste oppression, we got to fix their caste problem. Well in the United States, there is this US Commission on Religious Freedom and I had a closed door meeting with them recently and I told them about oppression in the United States. And they never mentioned one sentence of that in any of their reports over the last 15 years. And I mentioned that some of this overdone support for Christian evangelism in India is very nasty because that kind of evangelism is not a true change of the heart towards another faith, which is fine. But it's really a pejorative hitting. It's sort of like a militancy to denigrate and bring down the traditions of the country. And I showed them some evidence and they were surprised because they had never heard of this before. No one told them this before. They were being fed things through their channels which were self-serving. So I think there are certain networks, institutional alliances that need to be dismantled. And so Britain should also take with a grain of salt any reports you get from Christian evangelists in India. Basically they want to expand their numbers, expand their market share and they want to do it by claiming that they're bringing human rights. So this whole human rights business is feeding what I call breaking India forces. And it's bringing Britain a bad name and Britain should not be involved in that. Be realigned with those who are trying to build a positive India for all Indians including every kind of a community, every faith, everything. All Indians need to be part of a good positive grand narrative of India. And we ought to construct that rather than breaking each other apart. So that's a project we can do. You know, Britain missed the boat on the globalization of yoga. Americans did it first. Now in the 60s, the Americans discovered that this is a great thing and then they, they've taken them a couple of decades and now there's this globalization of a kind of an Americanized yoga. But Britain had 200 years to do it. Could have been more open-minded and said, you know, these guys, they got something nice also about them. And so it's not just money we can take out of them, but also they have some very nice culture. And this is very good for humanity. Maybe 200 years, if there had been 200 years of yogis all over the world, perhaps we would have been a more peaceful world. Perhaps Britain missed the boat on the yoga revolution and let the Americans do it. And now there is more happening. The cutting edge of mind sciences, cognitive science, neuroscience is basically taking lots of Indian techniques, advanced meditation, you know, chakra techniques and tantra techniques and so on, and really doing a neuroscientific empirical studies on it. My foundation has done, for 15 years we've been doing research on Indian contributions to mind sciences. I'm writing a book on that on the unacknowledged Indian contributions to mind sciences over the last 50 years in the West, looking at citing Western evidence. And in March we're doing a conference in Delhi University on the Indian mind sciences. So a lot of Westerners are actually already involved in this. A lot of people in Britain and US and various places are very much involved in a new paradigm of mind and how to move it forward which is very Indian when you look at it. So there are areas of collaboration. There is vegetarianism which is becoming popular. There are social theories of aging, of multi-generational families. There are so many areas of traditional Indian knowledge which are relevant today. And Britain can actually be part of that and help build those grand narratives together with us and this would be good for humanity. This could be probably jointly exported. So I will conclude by saying the Americans also did something else that Britain should have done. The multi-trillion dollar technology-led American economy is built, it runs on Indian brains. There is more Indians when you look at Microsoft, IBM, Google, Facebook, Apple and you look at the old technical giants like Bell Labs or NASA. There is more Indians than any other single ethnic group including white Americans. In fact when you look at Indians and Chinese and Japanese, the Asians are majority, most of these places. And I am not talking about low level coding type jobs, I am talking about billionaires, entrepreneurs, leaders, CEOs. Now Britain could have done that but instead Britain is a consumer of Made in America things and these Made in America things are really made by a lot of Indians. So in a sense, I am being a technocrat, I am grateful you guys are good consumers and you are a good market for us. So you see, the Indians supplied the brains but did not have, the Indians have a weakness, this is a tremendous problem for Indians. Indians did not know how to institutionalize. Indians are brilliant as one man here, one there, one there, one there. So the Americans figured out that we give them a home, we give them respect, we give them all the facilities they need and we institutionalize them and we get the best out of them and not hold them below a glass ceiling and then they will flourish. And so creating this kind of an atmosphere which made the USA, the chosen, the most preferred destination for every bright Indian wanted to go there in the last couple of generations was brilliant success for them. But UK could have done it and UK had the knowledge about India and had the clout and the political capital to do it and should have done it and earned a lot of money out of it. So I will conclude by just saying that there is a clash of grand narratives which has been going on since early part of history. You cannot dismantle these grand narratives as a way of getting rid of the problem. You have to develop their cooperation with each other with mutual respect. That is the challenge that we all have to do. And there is a technology-driven narrative of the future. The one thing that won't go away is technology. You can argue left or right or whatever, but whatever you're arguing, it has to be pro-technology. And the fact that Indians have a lot now invested in this and are a big resource should not be ignored. So given these opportunities for cooperation and collaboration between Britain and India, I'm hoping we can take some ideas, take some of these ideas further in a concrete way. And my foundation and I are available and very happy to take the lead with any British organization that would be interested in working with us. Thank you and Namaste. Thank you. Let's briefly examine the justifications for British reparations. Britain led the Industrial Revolution and emerged as the wealthiest nation in the 19th century. Because British textile factories required a steady flow of cheap raw materials, Britain colonized large parts of Africa and Asia. The British considered India as the jewel in the crown because India provided abundant labour and resources. British colonial rule in India was extremely exploitative and racist. Essentially, British industrial development took place at the expense of the oppression of Indians. The Industrial Revolution also made Britain the largest supplier of factory-made products. Consequently, the British transformed India into a market for British goods by destroying India's traditional agricultural sector and economy. Before British colonization, India controlled approximately 25% of the world market. In 1947, when India gained independence, India's market share had been drastically reduced to approximately 3%. According to Mike Davis, millions of Indians died due to starvation in the late 19th century and he characterizes these tragedies as colonial genocides. And what is even more horrifying is that these famines happen at a time when India was exporting vast quantities of food. So to recap, Rajiv Malhotra's proposal for soft-power reparations includes the following. A war memorial in England to honour Indian Army heroes who won World War I and World War II for the Allies. No financial reparations for India. British support for Swadeshi Indology. A total rejection of the Aryan invasion theory and Dravidian's hypothesis. Collaboration with Sanatan Dharmis on neuroscience, yoga, meditation and consciousness studies. Withdrawal of British support for the Indian postmodernist left and breaking India forces. And bilateral collaboration on cutting-edge technological advances and product development.