Public and Private Tragedies:
Voices of the Indian Mutiny
Regime change
As anyone who has ever studied the story of the rise of the British in India will know well, there is nothing new about the American NeoCons. The old game of installing puppet regimes, propped up by the West for its own political and economic ends, is one that the British had totally mastered by the late 18th century.
This chief of state was a ‘furious fanatic’ with ‘a rooted and inveterate hatred of Europeans’
Sometimes the parallels are almost uncanny. By the end of the Nineties, the hardliners in London who were calling for regime change found that they now had a powerful ally. This new president was not prepared to wait to be attacked: he was a new sort of conservative, aggressive in foreign policy, bitterly anti-French and intent on turning his country into an unrivalled global power. It was best, he believed, simply to remove any hostile Muslim regime that presumed to resist the West.
‘Furious fanatic’
There was no doubt who would be the first to be targeted: a Muslim dictator whose family had usurped power in a military coup. According to British sources, this chief of state was a ‘furious fanatic’ with ‘a rooted and inveterate hatred of Europeans’ who had ‘perpetually on his tongue the projects of Jihad’. He was also deemed to be ‘oppressive and unjust, [and a] perfidious negotiator’.
It was, in short, time to take out Tipu Sultan of Mysore. The president of the Board of Control, Henry Dundas, the minister who oversaw the East India Company, sent Richard Wellesley, elder brother of the Iron Duke, to India in 1798 with specific instructions to replace Tipu with a Western-backed puppet. First, however, Wellesley had to justify to the British public a policy whose outcome had already been long decided in private.
Industrialist, technocrat and intellectual
Wellesley began a campaign of vilification against Tipu. The sultan was portrayed as an aggressive Muslim monster who divided his time between oppressing his subjects and planning to drive the British into the sea.
This view is strongly disputed by most modern historians who tend to see Tipu as a modernising industrialist and technocrat who cleverly learned to use the weapons of the West against their own inventors. He was also a connoisseur and an intellectual, with a library containing some 2,000 volumes in several languages.
Mysore was duly invaded and Tipu killed by the British in the lucrative war of 1799.
