维杰·普拉沙德：为什么印度仍被英国困住？
作者：Vijay Prashad 2023 年 5 月 6 日 中国研究院
Vijay Prashad: Why Does India Remain Entrapped by the UK?https://medium.com/@thechinaacademy/vijay-prashad-why-does-india-remain-entrapped-by-the-uk-8fce05756f1c?
什么是南半球？ 印度历史学家维杰·普拉沙德认为，这不再是一个地理概念，而是一场从殖民主义中争取尊严的斗争。 今天，我们很荣幸邀请维杰·普拉沙德来告诉我们为什么印度仍然处于殖民主义的遗产之下。
维贾伊·普拉沙德 (Vijay Prashad) 是一位印度历史学家、编辑和记者，也是三大洲的执行董事。
我的名字是维杰·普拉沙德。 我是一名历史学家。 我也是一名记者。 我们非常有兴趣与跨国界和国界的人们进行交流。
40年前我第一次来到中国。 我是一个16岁的男孩。 我来到中国农村，去农村旅游。 令我印象深刻的是，中国的农民、农民等等都不是尴尬的人。 他们说话时直视你的眼睛。 这就是中国革命所做的。 要知道，1949年之前，中国农村的农民是不好意思看人的。 他们走路的时候都会低着头。 他们害怕房东。 他们被殴打。 人们不得不裹脚。 中国革命改变了农村的这种态度。 这种态度在世界许多地方仍然存在：等级制度、地主占有制等等。 这就是南方国家。 这是曾经处于相对殖民主义地位的国家的状况，无论是哪种方式。
嗯，这些国家根本无法发展，因为他们没有投资。 因此他们不得不向曾经殖民过他们的国家借钱。 但是，让我们坦白地说吧。 当殖民主义结束时，从印度、许多非洲国家等社会夺走的所有财富都被用来丰富北方国家。
例如，在英国，英国工业是由印度农民资助的。 所有利润都来自印度并投资于英国。 印度没有工业。 1947 年英国人被逐出印度时，印度的识字率仅为 13%。 英国统治印度300年，他们让这个国家没有财政、没有基础设施、没有财富、没有教育体系。 一切几乎都被摧毁了，经济仍然致力于向西方出口初级产品。
于是印度就去找西方国家说：借钱给我们吧。 你们拿走了我们所有的财富，现在又借钱给我们发展。” 他们借了钱，却负债累累，在债务危机之后陷入了灾难性的债务危机。 许多国家几十年来一直借钱，直到今天仍在偿还债务。
那么，新自由主义为什么会失败呢？ 为什么开发项目会失败？ 嗯，因为这些国家大多数根本没有资本。 他们没有人力资源； 他们没有发动革命。 中国人永远不要忘记，中国革命给这个国家带来的是尊严感。 这是关键。 他们给人民一种尊严感，他们让人民有尊严。
这不是全球南方其他国家能够做到的事情。 古巴做到了。 古巴击退了美国殖民主义，摆脱了黑手党和赌场，人民有尊严。 世界上大多数国家的情况并非如此。 所以你可以尝试任何你想要的经济政策。 如果你没有足够的资本，如果人民没有尊严，如果他们没有受过教育，如果他们没有医疗保健等等，那么你就很难成功。 那么，什么是南半球？ 那为什么还没有成功呢？ 它仍然受到殖民主义遗产的影响。
这是 1961 年不结盟运动五位主要创始人在南斯拉夫贝尔格莱德会面时的照片。南斯拉夫已不复存在，但它曾经存在过。 有约瑟普·布罗兹·铁托，铁托是南斯拉夫的政府首脑、国家元首。 其中有印度尼西亚总统邦·苏加诺，一个非常有趣的人，埃及总统贾迈勒·阿卜杜勒·纳赛尔，加纳总统夸梅·恩克鲁玛，印度总理贾瓦哈拉尔·尼赫鲁。
这张照片有趣的是，他们五人出身……铁托和恩克鲁玛并不是1955年在印度尼西亚万隆开的会议，而是亚非国家1955年在印度尼西亚万隆开的一次会议，他们谈到了创建的重要性。 南方的项目，第三世界的项目。 周恩来从中国来参加了那次会议，他是这次会议的明星，这是非常有趣的历史。 六年后，他们在贝尔格莱德会面，创建了不结盟运动。
现在不结盟运动非常重要，因为他们提出的论点是西方，主要是美国，但西欧和苏联必须减少军备竞赛，不要把所有的钱都浪费在武器上，并威胁到美国 毁灭世界，但利用这些财富有效地为南方创建一个发展项目。 因此，他们希望将枪支移入桥梁，将枪支移入教科书，将枪支移入医院，等等。 这是他们信息的一部分，但他们将几乎整个南方团结到了这个项目中。 这些国家从殖民列强手中赢得独立后不久。
第二次世界大战后，这些年轻的国家聚集在一起说：我们要自力更生。 我们希望您尊重我们，而且我们不会被愚弄。 旧的殖民制度仍在继续。
“南方国家”这个概念与许多概念一样具有误导性。 因为你认为这与南方、南半球、北方是较富裕的国家等有关。 这有点像早期你把东西分成东西方。 西方是欧洲和美国。 东方是苏联或中国或其他什么。 南方实际上是指摆脱殖民主义、被殖民并摆脱殖民主义的国家。
Vijay Prashad: Why Does India Remain Entrapped by the UK?
By Vijay Prashad 6 May 2023 The China Academy
What is Global South? Vijay Prashad, an Indian Historian, thinks it no longer a geographical concept, but a struggle for dignity from colonialism. Today, we are honoured to have Vijay Prashad to tell us why India still remains under the legacy of colonialism.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist, executive director of Tricontinental.
Myname is Vijay Prashad. I’m a historian. I’m also a journalist. We are very interested in communicating with people across boundaries and borders.
I came to China first 40 years ago. I was a 16-year-old boy. I came to rural China and went on a tour, of the countryside. I was impressed by the fact that the peasantry in China, the farmers, and so on were not people who were embarrassed. They looked you straight in the eye when they spoke. This is what the Chinese Revolution did. You know, before 1949, the Chinese peasantry in the countryside was embarrassed to look at people. They would look down when they walked. They were scared of landlords. They get beaten. People had to bind their feet. The Chinese revolution changed that attitude in the countryside. This attitude still exists in many parts of the world: hierarchies, landlordism, and so on. That’s what the Global South is. It’s the condition of countries that had been in a position of relative colonialism, one way or the other.
Well, these countries simply were not able to develop because they didn’t have investments. So they had to borrow money from the countries that used to colonize them. But look, let’s be quite frank. When colonialism ended all the wealth that had been taken from these societies like India, many African countries, and so on, had gone to enrich the countries of the north.
So in England, for instance, the English industry was financed by the Indian peasantry. All the profits were taken from India and invested in England. In India, there was no industry. When the British were thrown out of India in 1947, the literacy rate was merely 13%. British had ruled India for 300 years, they left the country with no finances, no infrastructure, really no wealth, no education system. Everything was pretty much destroyed and the economy was still geared to exporting primary goods to the west.
So India went to the Western countries and said: “Lend to lend us money. You took all our wealth and now lend us money to develop.” They borrowed money, but they went into debt and into a catastrophic debt crisis after the debt crisis. Many countries, they continue to pay the debt till today for decades of having borrowed money.
So, why did neoliberalism fail? Why did any development project fail? Well, because most of these countries simply don’t have capital. They don’t have the human resources; they didn’t make a revolution. People in China should never forget that what the Chinese Revolution gave this country was it gave the people of this country a sense of dignity. That’s the key thing. They gave the people a sense of dignity, they dignified people.
This is not something that the rest of the Global South was able to do. Cuba did it. Cuba fought off US colonialism, got rid of the Mafias and the casinos and the people are dignified. This is not the case in most of the world. So you can try any economic policy you want. It’s gonna be hard to succeed if you don’t have sufficient capital if the people aren’t dignified, if they’re not educated, if they don’t have health care, and so on. So, what’s the Global South? It’s that then why hasn’t it succeeded? It’s still suffering from the legacy of colonialism.
This is a photograph of the five principal founders of the Non-Aligned Movement as they were meeting in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1961. Yugoslavia no longer exists, but it existed then. There was Josip Broz Tito, Tito was the head of government, head of state in Yugoslavia. There was Bung Sukarno, the president of Indonesia, a very interesting man, Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, and Kwame Nkrumah, the president of Ghana, the prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru.
What’s interesting about the picture is that the five of them came out of… Tito and Nkrumah were not Bandung conferences in Indonesia in 1955, but the Asian and African countries had a conference in 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia where they talked about the importance of creating a project of the south, a third world project. Zhou En’lai came from China to that conference and he was a star of the conference, very interesting history. So 6 years later, they met in Belgrade and they created the Non-Aligned Movement.
Now the Non-Aligned Movement is very important because they were making the argument that the West, United States mainly, but Western Europe and the Soviet Union had to cut back on the arms race and not waste all his money on weapons and also threaten the destruction of the world, but use that wealth to effectively create a development project for the South. So they wanted to move guns into bridges, guns into school books, guns into hospitals, and so on. And that was a part of their message, but they united almost the entire South into this project. So soon after these countries won independence from colonial powers.
After World War two, these young states came together to say: we want to stand on our own feet. We want you to look at us with respect plus we’re not fooled. The old colonial system continues.
The concept Global South like many concepts is misleading. because you think it has something to do with the South, the southern hemisphere, the North being the richer countries, and so on. It was a little bit like in an earlier period you divided things by east and west. The West is Europe and the United States. The East is the Soviet Union or China or whatever. The South really refers to countries that came out of colonialism, that had been colonized and came out of colonialism.
In Search of New Narrative — The Global South and China 01
