Pankaj Mishra: The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class

The Malign Incompetence of the British Ruling Class 

With Brexit, the chumocrats who drew borders from India to Ireland are getting a taste of their own medicine.

By Pankaj Mishra

Mr. Mishra is the author, most recently, of “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.”

• Jan. 17, 2019
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Earl and Countess Mountbatten, behind naval and military members of the governor-general’s staff, descending the steps of Government House in New Delhi on June 21, 1948.CreditAssociated Press

Describing Britain’s calamitous exit from its Indian empire in 1947, the novelist Paul Scott wrote that in India the British “came to the end of themselves as they were” — that is, to the end of their exalted idea about themselves. Scott was among those shocked by how hastily and ruthlessly the British, who had ruled India for more than a century, condemned it to fragmentation and anarchy; how Louis Mountbatten, accurately described by the right-wing historian Andrew Roberts as a “mendacious, intellectually limited hustler,” came to preside, as the last British viceroy of India, over the destiny of some 400 million people.

Further Reading:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/opinion/sunday/brexit-ireland-empire.html