Friday , April 18 , 2008 http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080418/jsp/opinion/story_9150223.jsp ----- Harshawardhan_Bosham Nimkhedkar Nagpur, India OUTPOSTS OF TYRANNY - It is time Africa stopped blaming others for its misfortunes by Swapan Dasgupta History has been unkind to Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of British India. Arguably the most glamorous and image- conscious of the Men Who Ruled India - the "superior" Lord Curzon comes a close second - Mountbatten has been berated for abdicating his responsibilities and forcing the pace of the transfer of power on August 14-15, 1947. Many historians have suggested that had the original timetable of June 1948 been adhered to, the violence which accompanied Partition could well have been contained, if not averted altogether. The unseemly haste with which Mountbatten dismantled a 190-year old inheritance has been dissected in great detail because it was the beginning of what a Whitehall mandarin described as the "stampede from Empire". Less publicized, not least because some of them were also less consequential, were the shambolic abdication of "imperial responsibilities" in Burma, Palestine, Sudan, Aden, Kenya and, of course, Rhodesia. Compared to the devastation that the Colonial Office left behind in diverse corners of Asia and Africa, Mountbatten's imperious callousness seems the epitome of shrewd calculation. In retrospect, India, along with the self-governing Dominions of the Old Commonwealth, has been the great success story of an Empire that practised insidious racism, but simultaneously maintained the pretence of trusteeship. Never mind the different aesthetic trajectory of post-Independence development, India is seen to be something that the British Empire got right. For the past 60 years, India has adhered to Westminster-style democracy, professed the rule of law and, with many hiccups along the way, made the transition from extreme backwardness to patchy modernity. The old Orientalist love affair with India, which was initially in danger of being perverted into quasi-spiritual escapades of flower children, has, mercifully, found a new meaning in modern capitalism. Even the English language, which was initially threatened by post-colonial nativism, has endured and given India a competitive advantage over a relatively insular Middle Kingdom. There have been other success stories too. The entrepreneurial legacy of Sir Thomas Raffles persists in Singapore, Hong Kong has survived China, Sri Lanka's democracy has not been overturned by a damaging civil war, Mauritius remains an off-shore paradise of a different kind, and Peter Ustinov playing Hercule Poirot wouldn't feel out of place in some of the "rocks and islands" of the Caribbean. And, of course, there is Ireland, a fractured island which has brushed off centuries of disdain and mockery to emerge as one of the most vibrant and prosperous countries of the European Union. Unfortunately, these celebrated successes have been overshadowed by the unending spate of bad news from Africa. Post-War Britain's exhausted withdrawal from Empire led to the transfer of power to African leaders who had such impeccable credentials that both Lord Macaulay, Benjamin Jowett (the legendary Master of Balliol College, Oxford) and, at a pinch, Cecil Rhodes would have approved. (Rest of the text snipped)