New Delhi, Oct 13, 2025

In the quiet, half-empty chamber of the British House of Commons in July 1806, a series of debates unfolded concerning the “India Budget”. To the handful of parliamentarians present, it was a matter of accounts, of deficits and debts, of a colossal commercial enterprise teetering on the edge of financial distress.

But viewed from the perspective of India — the vast, silent land whose fate these numbers represented — the discussion was something else entirely. It was a stark and damning audit, not of finances, but of the very nature of colonial rule itself. It was a reckoning that laid bare a system of ruinous exploitation, staggering hypocrisy, and a profound, almost casual, indifference to the millions of lives being governed and drained from half a world away.

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