Independent national government is necessary if India is to resist successfully a Japanese invasion, since an oppressed nation cannot fight for the freedom of its oppressors, said Paul M. Sweezy '32, Faculty Instructor in Economics, in a Current Events talk in New Lecture Hall yesterday.
According to Sweezy, maintenance of the status quo, which keeps a large majority of the population starving, is impossible. British rule has been a head-ache to India for 150 years, he said. They plundered and exploited it alone until the dissolution of the East India Company in 1813 opened it to free trade.
The history of India since 1813 has been a story of competition between handicraft and manufacturing. Indian communities were economically balanced between agriculture and handicraft, sweezy pointed out. But production of India's excellent, handmade goods has been ruined by imports, throwing more people into agriculture and thus disrupting the economic balance.
India's lack of progress, brought about by British domination, would be gradually remedied, said Sweezy, because educational, industrial, and economic problems will iron themselves out if the nation is allowed to follow its own needs and is not bent to the caprice of Britain.
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