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She said very clearly that the poor justification for the claim rather than the claim itself is the problem.
Really? So it's just an axiom that everything bad in India is because of the "Britishers"? That certainly helps to understand Indians' beliefs, though it doesn't make me more sympathetic to them.
I don't have a portal to a parallel universe – the only place with technology that advanced was India 3000 years ago – but I can direct your attention to Ethiopia. The country had a long history of written language and a centralized government, and was under colonial rule only for about a decade before and during World War II. After the war, Italy even had to pay reparations, so the damage that did happen during this period was compensated. (The Allies presumably decided Italy's conquest was an illegitimate war of aggression unlike the totally just and lawful conquest of everywhere else by Western countries.)
And yet Ethiopia "is still a cesspit of suffering", with a GDP per capita significantly lower than even that of India. That's because it was a cesspit of suffering before the Italian occupation.
I'm not going to argue that British colonialism was a net positive for India, and the British certainly committed many unjustifiable abuses, but I do strongly object to the common Indian nationalist claim that India was extremely rich and developed in the 18th century before the British showed up and stole everything. It was poor when they came and it was poor when they left. The reason India is still poor is the 75 years of awful economic policy between then and now, and that can be blamed entirely on Indians. The UK didn't instigate the farm bill protests.
You explicitly chose this example expecting it to be unobjectionable, so I apologize if my objection was unexpected. If it helps, I share your distaste for Americans' views on Indian immigrants in software, especially the rhetoric surrounding H1B visas. And I am not American, I'm just constantly exposed to American politics thanks to the internet.
I do not appreciate you trying to strawman my position.
The core argument of Indian Nationalists is that the concept of India is not a colonial construct that only exists due to British Colonialization. They argue that people in the region have been linked by shared culture despite having lived through frequently changing borders.
Indian Nationalists do not make any claims to India's past economic heft. In face they very much accept that they have a long way to go. They feel that the fractured nature of their people works against them and that to accelerate development there is a need to leverage the cultural links to build a shared ethos if you ever want to get things done. For them the British are just one among the many foreign conquerors that have ruled the region since the 12th century. I very much detest it when people try to reduce it to just "Indians think India sucks because of the British". Whether or not it can be proved that India is worse off due to colonization is not at all a part of my argument.
Going back to elaborating on the point I had been trying to make to @justawoman.
What I am saying is even if there is objective evidence that India was destined to be the way it is regardless of past events, that wouldn't make the fact any less painful. And I recognize that some arguments that folks on themotte may throw around casually are actually painful to read depending on what race, religion, culture, gender or background you come from.
The whole segment on my experiences as an Indian on the internet is essentially me trying to say yes, I can empathize with the experience of @justawoman who has to argue with people casually discussing a topic that she cares deeply about and would only accept the highest standards of evidence.
But while I think that folks on themotte can be more careful with how they throw around words, it should not be something that's verboten, since topics when sociological, at best have scant evidence and that's the best we can ever get.
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