Posted on 08/05/2021 7:15:24 AM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1775, inconvenient Indian official Nandakumar (or Nand Kumar, or Nuncomar) was hanged on a forgery charge — all too conveniently inflicted at the very time he was accusing British Governor-General Warren Hastings of corruption.
Nandakumar and Hastings decidedly did not get along; the Indian believed he had been unfairly denied a plum career assignment.
He leveled in response an accusation that Hastings was taking payola in exchange for his appointments.
English pols involved in the administration of India, such as Philip Francis, John Clavering and George Monson, had their own rivalries with Hastings and wanted to pursue these charges. Instead, within weeks, Nandakumar was facing years-old forgery charges,* and two months after his trial, he was at the end of a rope.
Hastings’ actual involvement in this circumstance is impossible to prove, but:
The certain facts are that Nand Kumar was Hastings’s enemy, that [India’s Chief Justice Elijah] Impey was Hastings’s friend; that at a moment of grave crisis in Hastings’s life, when Nand Kumar was the most eminent witness against his name and fame, that witness was arraigned on a charge that was very old, that had been suddenly converted from a civil to a criminal charge; that he was tried, found guilty, and executed. On the basis of that bare narrative of facts it would seem that if Hastings had nothing to do with the matter, he might almost as well have had as far as the judgment of posterity went. The thing was too apt, the conditions too peculiar not to leave their stigma upon the memory of the man who gained most by them.
This sort of questionable administration of the crown’s possessions on the subcontinent would lead in 1781 to the Amending Act....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Gee, sounds like TODAY’S USA...........................
When the British Raj failed…..kill the reason why.
In fairness to British, the Portuguese colony of Goa was worse. British freed India in 1947 from colonial rule and left on friendly terms. The Portuguese had to be evicted with force by the newly created free country’s military.
A quibble here, it was not actually the 'British Raj' at that time, it was the British East India Company, and that was just one of the European invaders placed atop of a very chaotic semi-nation that was the Indian sub-continent. In the 1700s, the Islamic Mughals were losing their centuries long grip that was centered in North India. Shia Persia had staged an extensive raid into Mughal India in 1739 and weakened the Mughals further.
While the Portuguese were the first Europeans to claim possessions (1505-1961) in India, they were far from the last as the Dutch (1605-1825), British (1611-1947) and French (1667-1954) soon followed. Other than the Portuguese, all of these were chartered companies from their home kingdoms seeking profits from textiles and spices. To give an idea of how chaotic India was, in 1539, Portuguese Diu was besieged by a combined fleet of Ottomans, Mamluks (Egypt), the Gujarat Sultanate and the Zaomorin of Calicut seeking to replace these pesky Europeans with good Muslims to rule over the native Hindu Marathas.
By the 1700s, European rule was being battled for between the French and British, usually with local support from the various Raj & Sultanate subkingdoms. These actions were what have led some historians to call War of the Austrian Succession [1740-48] as the first global war with combat in Europe, North America, Caribbean and in India as well as sea battles in the Far East.
Abuses, like the one from this article, led to the downfall of the British East India Company (BEIC) after the Sepoy / Indian Mutiny of 1857, after which the British Government basically nationalized all of its assets.
An interesting side note is that in the latter stages of the ongoing Anglo/French/Indian conflicts of the late 1700s, a well-born but somewhat impoverished Anglo-Irish Colonel got a considerable reputation in a BEIC campaign, the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War (1798-1800). Arthur Wellesley was so successful in his Indian BEIC service that he became a Major General at age 33 in 1802. After returning from India in 1805, he enjoyed some further triumphs in the Napoleonic Wars, ending at Waterloo under his earned Noble name and title, the Duke of Wellington!
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