r/polandball • u/swapsthegreat I is Fearless • Aug 15 '26
contest entry "Why do you Indians hate us?" As Britain walks away with 45 trillion dollars
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u/SnooBooks1701 Aug 15 '26
"Y'all" Yank located
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u/Professional-Pace612 Aug 15 '26
Ah yes, the USA. criticising Britian for something they did 200 years ago, whilst doing the exact same thing right now.
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u/Electrical_Thinker Aug 16 '26
Not 200, 75-80 years ago, my grandfather was born under British rule and my great grandfather, Under queen victoria.
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u/adyingmoderate Republic+of+Texas Aug 15 '26
You can and should criticize the US for its current actions but it is false equivalency to compare what Great Britain did to India to what the US is doing. A wannabe dictator has illegally circumvented Congress in a failed attempt at self enrichment and can’t back down because of his ego. Great Britain successfully conquered 1/4 of the world, and used indentured Indians (indentured servitude is explicitly prohibited under the US Constitution) as a substitute for slaves as far away as the Caribbean, etc etc etc.
I also think it’s ridiculous to fault a people for their ancestors being dicks. Parliament should issue an apology and maybe return the stuff in the British Museum and be done with it.
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u/2005HondaCivic245 Vietnamese girl in the US Aug 16 '26
Involuntary indentured servitude (and slavery) is explicitly prohibited under the US Constitution ... UNLESS as punishment for a crime
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u/quangtit01 Land of talking trees Aug 16 '26
Hence the US imprisonment rate. Free labor y'all.
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u/Professional-Pace612 Aug 17 '26
Slavery with extra steps, and it's still the African Americans taking the brunt...
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u/Professional-Pace612 Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 18 '26
Sure, why doesn't the Met return their artifacts? Then all the US Billionaires can return their private collections as well.
Then all the American coporations can pay all the back tax they owe in the regions they operate, and stop funneling all that wealth to the American nobility ( a humorous misnomer of course, there's nothing noble about tech bros or US innvestors).
Then the US can remove all their military bases from foreign soil. Reinstall all the elected heads of state they have replaced, pay reparations for every civilian they've ever killed in their conflicts. Pay reparatrions for every one of THEIR OWN CITIZENS that they experimented on FFS. etc etc etc
The list goes on. Same shit, different mechanisims, no less brutal or bloody. On and On.
So yeh, glass houses and all that.....
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u/MojoDex United Kingdom Aug 15 '26
"Y'all"
Inglorious Basterds three finger meme.
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u/Psychic_Hobo Land of Pooooor Deeeciiiiisions Aug 15 '26
Another day, another "Remind the world of the Brits so they don't pay attention to the skeletons in our closet" meme
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u/FreeElderberry4817 Hong Kong Aug 15 '26
There is a joke that goes something like India hates uk Canada likes them Hong Kong loves them
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u/shantytown_by_sea Aug 16 '26
Older Mumbai on the island's south loves them as well because they were 1% elite business and clerical workforces settled by them ,Hongkong was similar city settled for this purpose,maybe 3rd/4th most important asian harbour city in their empire and top was Mumbai (bombay).
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u/chixnsix Minnesota Aug 15 '26
"Jarvis, sort by controversial"
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u/Cuddlyaxe Vijayanagara Empire Aug 15 '26
I mean it's a about India, 50/50 on whether the racism will be at the top or bottom
I think a day or two ago a question like "What if the Brits never colonized India" was posted on /r/AlternateHistoryHub which for the record is usually very left wing and progressive
That thread legitimately felt like it was straight from Elon's Twitter. Tons of colonial apologia, poo in the loo and calling Indians inferior
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u/ColeWjC Canada Aug 15 '26
That’s a surprise that an alt history sub is left wing. Alternate history usually attracts wehraboos and South Will Rise Again types.
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u/Cuddlyaxe Vijayanagara Empire Aug 15 '26
I mean it's reddit lol
I feel like generally the only right wing subs are the ones which explicitly set out to be
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u/DasGutYa Aug 17 '26
Doesn't have to be racism/colonial apologia to rebuke nationalist nonsense like 45 trillion.
Racism does however stem from ignorance, which most of these statements come from. So continue the cycle instead of breaking it ignorance I guess?
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u/Cuddlyaxe Vijayanagara Empire Aug 17 '26
Who said anything about 45 trillion? The comments were talking about how amazing the British were for building railroads and how Indians would somehow be magically worse off without them
You're literally shadowboxing an argument with who you want lol
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u/PhilosopherDry1859 Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
Can you read? He's talking about the racism and what lndia suffered through. It's not a lie to say Britain brutally exploited lndia
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u/Potential-South-2807 Aug 15 '26
45 trillion lmao. Do you hear yourself?
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u/ieatpies Roman Empire Aug 16 '26
It's a number that some say, but it relies on a 5% compounding interest assumption over 250 years.
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u/Username-17 Australia Aug 16 '26
If a child stole a loaf of bread during the siege of Vienna under this logic it would compound to a historical grievance of 987 trillion dollars.
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u/Adr_LDN Aug 17 '26
And given the time that has passed since Utsa Patnaik’s decided to invent it and published her figures, by her own methodology the UK has, at 2026, now ‘stolen’ more than the entire value of global GDP for all of human history from India.
It’s a complete joke (as Tirthankar Roy et al have ably noted).
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u/itznimitz Aug 15 '26
skill issue
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u/Daddy2222991 Aug 15 '26
Yeah look at current England 😆
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u/itznimitz Aug 15 '26
generational skill issue
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Aug 15 '26
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u/Additional_Impress81 Aug 15 '26
Impressive, very nice. Bringing up the rapes of innocent girls as a gotcha in an online argument.
Tosser.
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u/Daddy2222991 Aug 15 '26
When you label "colonial rule" As (skill issue) then it's completely okay I guess, do you even know what those people did to Indians? Never accountability I guess for you whites, I love how your people are wiping out each day.
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u/Additional_Impress81 Aug 15 '26
Shitty joke on a website=Bringing up the actual victimisation of real people.
You eternal victims will forever cry about the past and so will continuously give ammunition to get dunked on by actual racists. Keep it up bro.
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u/PhilosopherDry1859 Aug 17 '26
He isn't giving "ammunition" by talking what his country suffered throuh
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u/Additional_Impress81 Aug 18 '26
Really? Gloating about the suffering of the girls in England by foreigners, a topic that is actually causing white supremacists to go out and burn shit, is not giving ammunition to them to go even more balistic? That's a first to me.
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u/PhilosopherDry1859 Aug 18 '26
Right. It's not ammunition to talk about what his country went through. Since you're Balkan? Don't speak on South Asia
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u/vamster00 Aug 15 '26
A bunch of salty whites lmao
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u/Nathanaelhead Northern+Ireland Aug 15 '26
Salty over india? No. I don’t think so
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u/WASDKUG_tr Ottoman Kebab Empire Aug 15 '26
I had a person from ukraine complainingablut the "Indian immigration destroying ukraine".
There are no indian mass migration to ukraine
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u/No_Possibility_6754 Australian-Raised kiwi sniper Aug 15 '26
perfect timing for independence day fr
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u/Shiine-2 Aug 15 '26
And drew borders that cause disputes to this day.
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u/BevvyTime Aug 15 '26
The Brits may have drawn the line, but the neighbours were already there.
It’s not the Brits’ fault they treated each other that way…
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u/Ray3x10e8 Aug 16 '26
It's imprecise to say that the violence wasn't caused due to the line.
What you are saying is also true, but indeed much of the violence was cause because the line did not care about cultural boundaries.
The line was drawn in 5 weeks, by a person who knew nothing about the demographics of the region. Many villages were cut in half. On the morning of 15th August, the land that you lived and grew up in was suddenly no longer in the country that you wanted to be in. You had to make the 100 mile journey on foot, you were going to be living in refugee camps. Now do you see how an extremist can take this situation and turn people against eachother?
Of course the journey was going to be dangerous. People were killed as much due to religious violence as much by opportunistic bandits.
So many deaths could have been prevented if the British cared about India. But I do not think anyone in this thread can argue with me on this point. Why would anyone care about slaves anyway?
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u/Username-17 Australia Aug 16 '26
A united India would've had a civil war, and anyone who says that they could've drawn a line that would've prevented a significant amount of deaths is lying. India in those days made Yugoslavia look like apartheid.
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u/This_Charmless_Man Aug 15 '26
Similar thing happened with Ireland when they left the UK. The new state had basically no idea how to run it's social services so the Catholic church graciously offered to step in and help. It's what caused the Magdalene Laundries to become a thing and why slave labour was used in Ireland up until the late 90s to produce board games for Hasbro.
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u/AltruisticJelly5032 India Aug 15 '26
Their policies may have not cultivated the religious tension, but their caste policies definitely added fuel to the fire. Decennial census, Criminal Tribes Act, Punjab Land Alienation Act, etc. Separate electorates failed miserably. It became vote bank politics at the end.
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u/Talidel Aug 15 '26
India is going through a childish "blame the last adult that has responsibility for us" stage of growing up.
In the next few decades, they'll stop blaming someone else for all their problems, and do the adult thing of looking at how to fix their problems.
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u/Osiryx89 Aug 15 '26
Life must be so easy if you can just blame everything on the British.
It's pathetic, really.
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u/Talidel Aug 15 '26
The lines cause problems because the people hate each other. Not because of the lines themselves.
Before those lines, those people were just casually genociding towns because their flavour of god came in more options.
The Brits made them all go to one side of a line, so at least there was less of all the murdering each other across the entire country. Now it's just down a mostly agreed line.
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u/Adr_LDN Aug 17 '26
The proposition that ‘the Brits’ shouldn’t have acceded to the demands of Jinnah and the Muslim League, and that they could’ve held together a united India without even more massive inter-ethnic and religious violence is utterly laughable.
Moronic American nonsense on full display here.
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u/PhilosopherDry1859 Aug 17 '26
Are you blaming the people for the violence
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u/Adr_LDN Aug 17 '26
Magically enough, ‘the people’ perpetrated the violence of partition. They weren’t being used as meat puppets by some insane, moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash caricature of the British.
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u/PhilosopherDry1859 Aug 17 '26 edited Aug 17 '26
It’s easy to dismiss state responsibility when you pretend the options are either "cartoon villains" or "wild locals." Britain spent 100 years locking India out of basic human rights. When you respond to peaceful political petitions with massacres, violent resistance isn't random - it's the direct outcome of a brutal colonial system that killed off every peaceful option.
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u/Adr_LDN Aug 17 '26
This is just either Indian nationalist cope or wholesale ignorance. It’s not ‘wild locals’, or waffle about ‘basic human rights’, it’s simple religious animosity. The same as India still has decades after independence and had before the British and Europeans arrived. It’s also not unique to India at all. This is also nothing to do with ‘violent resistance’, you absolute tool - the violence here was among Hindu and Muslim communities, not against the British.
You seem to know absolutely nothing about the Muslim League, the INC or literal decades of political mobilisation along religious lines. Communal violence was already rife by 1946, so the notion that the British could’ve forced the Raj to stay whole post independence and not created an even worse civil war is completely unserious.
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u/Idiotic_experimenter Aug 15 '26
Literally,every time they tried the two state solution by partition,it has blown up spectacularly in their face!
It doesn't take a lot of reading to realise this
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u/Ihatenukingkids Aug 15 '26
Let me draw a border that has Brits and French living together in one state and then call them uncivilized when they start warring again.
Not my fault if they treat each other that way, right??
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u/ZhtWu Ryukyu Kingdom Aug 15 '26
Hey! We fought the English for more than 200 years on our own soil, then facetanked Germany during two World Wars, and all we get for that is being called cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Give us a break, will ya?
The Brits have trolled the whole globe, pit them against someone else for a change. :'D
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u/Wooden_Base4673 England Aug 15 '26
It's the Yanks who call you that, not the English. The English call you frogs, frenchies or even french.
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u/adyingmoderate Republic+of+Texas Aug 16 '26
Whatever you say Redcoat.
I’ve never even read/ heard the term surrender monkey before today, but a subset of Americans do like to poke fun of the French for losing against Hitler and having groups like the LVF, and conscripted labor. Oddly more common in the South, which is ironic given their support for the Confederacy.
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u/Friendly-Olive-3465 Aug 18 '26
And somehow less disputes than the previous borders since India is a united country
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u/ChameleonCoder117 California Nationalist Aug 15 '26
India vs Pakistan conflicts, that might cause global nuclear war: Result of british line drawing
Israel vs Palestine conflicts, that might cause global nuclear war: Result of british line drawing
Myanmar civil war: Myanmar only exists as a result of british line drawing
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Aug 15 '26
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u/Blitcut Aug 16 '26
Israel vs Palestine conflicts is caused by the lines drawn by the United Nation
There were actually no lines drawn as the British refused to implement a partition. The actual border ended up being the frontline when the 1948 war ended.
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u/Dilbertreloaded Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
Borders were drawn to ensure they will fight each other for centuries, and not draw their ire at the looters.
Edit: I am sure the naive world conquerors were so bad at planning that they only had one scenario in mind. The centuries of manipulation and gaslighting that country had expertise in continues to this day.
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u/SnooBooks1701 Aug 15 '26
No, they were drawn in a rush because the Indians and Pakistanis wanted the Brits out asap. The only alternative was not drawing a border and leaving behind an immediate civil war that would likely result in several genocides
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u/Lanky_Panda1735 Aug 15 '26
This is historically illiterate. The original date was set for somewhere around June 1948; but London suddenly wanted to get out as soon as possible. The INC was actually pretty angry over the preponement and the unstructured and hasty pullout
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u/Stromatolite-Bay Aug 16 '26
You say that while not recognising partition was proposed by a political party in India
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u/Lanky_Panda1735 Aug 16 '26
That wasn't the question/assertion at hand or the one I responded to though?
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u/Dilbertreloaded Aug 15 '26
Except their policies were consistent at gaslighting and causing infighting and continue their looting . They had ample time in decades to plan all these . Drew the border and millions died within months.
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u/SnooBooks1701 Aug 15 '26
They didn't plan for independence for decades, they were given a deadline to draw the border and the guy did the best he could
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u/Stromatolite-Bay Aug 16 '26
The India National Congress refused to allow all of Punjab and Bengal to be given to Pakistan since in there own words they would secure as much land for India as possible
The Pakistan movement also developed in India and gained the political clout to demand partition. No one else wanted it to happen
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u/Psychic_Hobo Land of Pooooor Deeeciiiiisions Aug 15 '26
Nah, see that requires us Brits to have forward planning and have actually cared at all about the people we horrendously colonised
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u/yasssshrai Aug 15 '26
At the same time Indians are themselves to blame for having some of the stupidest policies in the late 20th century: License Raj; focus on industrialization before improving agriculture; completely unnecessary centralisation of the government to the point where CCP provinces have more economic freedom than Indian states; farm laws that incentivise your average Indian farming family to somehow profit off 1 hectare of land.
They are reforming gradually nowadays, however.
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u/Stromatolite-Bay Aug 16 '26
The modern trillions estimate does not really holdup because the interest calculations have errors. It is still a lot but not that much
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u/Hot_Indication2133 Devon Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
No way to excuse the heinous shit we did there but how would you explain the absolutely ludicrous amounts of wealth amassed by the previous set of rulers? No doubt their subjects gave them all their money out of love. At least we saved them from the French.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_in_the_Indian_subcontinent
this is going to be an interesting competition just for the comments sections, we're all going to be educated about something, lol.
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u/DasGutYa Aug 17 '26
The 45 trillion estimate was made by a crank historian, widely debunked and laughed at.
Stating it basically outs you as a fool.
No, you can't count the final high price of manufactured goods as the 'stolen' price of raw materials bought for cheap, or else China and the U.S would steal half the world's gdp every year from that logic.
Ofcourse, nobody wants to tally the price of infrastructure and over 1000 universities built there to extract those goods and keep order either, because I suspect it would look pretty even and nationalist can't get angry about that.
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u/Wandering_sage1234 Aug 15 '26
The national dish of England is
Chicken Tikka Masala
Brothers, we have achieved our objective!
India now rules the UK! (I'm jk)
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Aug 16 '26
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u/Wandering_sage1234 Aug 16 '26
It’s still the dish.
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Aug 16 '26
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u/VeneMage An Actual British Barry Aug 16 '26
Speak for yourself.
I have fish and chips for dinner probably once or twice a month. Much prefer a curry and easily at least once a week. This as an Englishman born and bred.
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Aug 16 '26
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u/VeneMage An Actual British Barry Aug 16 '26
I’m contesting the ‘nobody’s eating tikka masala on the weekly’. Many are.
Plus my curries are either homemade or shop-bought. Are these included in those stats, or restaurant/take away-bought only?
It’s not a big deal either way. Both are nice meals, I just prefer a ruby.
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u/Wandering_sage1234 Aug 16 '26
Good on you for making those curries home made. Today’s curries are full of salt and sugar.
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u/Wandering_sage1234 Aug 16 '26
Everyone goes into an Indian restaurant and orders Chicken tikka masala not realising we have much in cuisine. Very annoying.
I don’t like fish can’t eat it but like the chips. 🍟
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u/THROWAWTRY Aug 16 '26
This is such an incorrect statement that 5 seconds googling would prove otherwise. Curry consumption in the UK is near the level of places like Pakistan and Sri Lanka. On top of that it is a national dish, not the.
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u/Adr_LDN Aug 17 '26
Anyone who thinks Utsa Patnaik’s utterly ludicrous “45 trillion” number is to be taken seriously is an idiot.
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u/Express_Ad8931 16d ago
Britain recollected not a lot of money in taxes from India (or any colony at that...) the main bussiness was always having a near absolute monopoly on the commerce of the colonies.
But they still had to (most times) pay for the resources they took, like there is a reaspm the richest man in Britain was the sultan of hyderabad.
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u/Salphabeta USA Beaver Hat Aug 15 '26
Amazing they were so rich a much poorer country could just show up and just take such vast sums.
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Aug 15 '26
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u/LoasNo111 Maratha Empire Aug 15 '26
That reform was pushed by an Indian king lmfao
And I hope you realize that it wasn't a common practice either
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u/therandomham Circassia is neat Aug 15 '26
It’s really convenient that every colonized people was just moments away from stagnating and ceasing to adopt new reforms or technologies.
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u/zaxscotch Aug 15 '26
Ahh yes, saving widows only to end up creating more by causing mass famine several times throughout bengal for the sake of profits. Truly a british move. You can't have widows burning if they all starve to death beforehand.
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u/fezzuk England Aug 15 '26
Yeah absolutly no famines in india before the brii Tish arrived.
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u/mathdhruv India Aug 15 '26
There wasn't forced cultivation of "cash crops" such as indigo to feed the British textile industry instead of food crops, though.
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u/WASDKUG_tr Ottoman Kebab Empire Aug 15 '26
Not the point, point is Churchill literally man made a famine
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u/fezzuk England Aug 15 '26
No it was a natural famine churchill just didnt divert food from the UK to help.
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u/WASDKUG_tr Ottoman Kebab Empire Aug 15 '26
Is bro stupid???
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u/Agreeable-Weather-89 Aug 15 '26
Your link points to several natural and non Churchill factors.
What exactly did Churchill do?
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u/WASDKUG_tr Ottoman Kebab Empire Aug 15 '26
Keep in mind The British authorities worked under the government, which the PM was churchill:
1, Denial Policy: British authorities in Bengal destroyed local rice stocks and confiscated thousands of boats to prevent them from falling into the hands of advancing Japanese forces, which crippled local transport to help the Famine
2, Like in Ireland's case, Export: British Raj continued to export food to sustain military forces and imperial garrisons overseas during the crisis, instead of getting food to relieve the Famine.
And lastly Number 3 which is most i portant, UK Denied Shipping Relief: Churchill’s war cabinet repeatedly denied immediate requests for large grain shipping imports to the Raj when there was a major famine going on which they already knew about
Point being that they knew about it and didnt care, even made it worse cuz of the Boat denial policy which basically did scortched earth on the region.
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u/peppermanfries Aug 15 '26
Always one of these bozos in the comments
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u/Psychic_Hobo Land of Pooooor Deeeciiiiisions Aug 15 '26
There's more than one these days, whole lotta weird racists cropping up in this sub
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u/WASDKUG_tr Ottoman Kebab Empire Aug 15 '26 edited Aug 15 '26
"Londistan is coming"
look inside
less than 1-2% Muslim population
Edit: FabulousSpite5822, Still wrong, 2026 consensus says LESS THAN 6%, these farage dickriders bro. He is talking about london WHEN IM TALKING ABOUT ALL OF UK
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Aug 15 '26
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u/WASDKUG_tr Ottoman Kebab Empire Aug 15 '26
Comparing a state which was Muslim for more than 1000 Years, not only that was one of the places of ancient civilization, TO FUCKING BRITAIN
Its Iran BTW, not fucking "Persia". Or are you ons of those Iranian Monarchy apologists?
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u/WASDKUG_tr Ottoman Kebab Empire Aug 15 '26
It was literally persia until the 1900's dumbass, they called it persia when it was Muslim.
Shows your intellect real nicely
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