Coming from a family of Indian partition victims who had to flee Bangladesh to become refugees in Kolkata, I am not a fan of the British royals. As with any peoples who are colonized and abused by a foreign nation, we have in some part atleast our own people to blame for our troubles. That being said, the atrocities of the colonizer does not become less heinous because they had help from the natives. To that end, I very much appreciate Kadyan's sentiments:
Numerous observers noted how the British Empire plundered around $45 trillion from India over two centuries of colonialism that resulted in millions of deaths, and how the Kohinoor—one of the largest cut diamonds in the world, with an estimated value of $200 million—was stolen from India to be set in the queen mother’s crown.
“Why are Indians mourning the death of Queen Elizabeth II?” asked Indian economist Manisha Kadyan on Twitter. “Her legacy is colonialism, slavery, racism, loot, and plundering. Despite having chances, she never apologized for [the] bloody history of her family. She reduced everything to a ‘difficult past episode’ on her visit to India. Evil.”
Did some good come about for India as a result of British colonization - maybe it did but no one knows what our fortunes might have been if we were never colonized. That is the fork of the road that was never taken. As it turns out, the Irish are not fans of this lady either.
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