Hindu nationalists have succeeded where the English have failed
It seemed like a perfectly sensible policy at the time, but with the coherence of hindsight, it can now be seen as the first in a concatenation of cock-ups. The year was 1772. The East India Company was in charge of Bengal, its tiny bridgehead in eastern India from where it went on to acquire a tidy chunk of the subcontinent over the course of the following century. Its boss there was a chap called Warren Hastings, who was keen to repair the reputation of Company men. No one was particularly fond of these money-grubbing jumped-up parvenus, and especially not in the home counties. And Hastings happened to be a man with some intellectual pretensions.
