« India beat England to tie series [3 updates] :+: Udupi Palace, Tacoma Park, MD: A Review. »

History

British military tested poison gas on Indian soldiers in 1930s

By: Santosh :+: Under: History
On: ⋅ September 6, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment
Discuss in our off-topic forums

Looks like you are new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

There are some questions in life that seem paradoxical. Why are desis intent on making their skin lighter while goras suntan to make their skin darker?

Finally, we may have discovered the answer to this question - nerve gas. I read this story on numerous websites about the British military using Indian soldiers as guinea pigs in testing agents for chemical warfare. The logic for performing these tests on Indian soldiers was mind boggling - the British wanted to see if the Indians’ skin was more susceptible to nerve gas than that of the British.

The experiments to determine whether mustard gas damaged Indians’ skin more than that of British soldiers began in the early 1930s and lasted more than 10 years at a military site in Rawalpindi…

Maybe the nerve gas actually did less damage to the Indian skin less than to that of the British and maybe that is why the goras suntan? If so why are we desis trying to become lighter skinned?? Hmmmmmmmm……… questions of much importance arise …………

Given the nature of these horrific tests, one can only assume that their purpose was to determine if using nerve gas was an option in case of an military uprising on the Indian subcontinent, ala the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. Another reason for these tests could’ve been to determine whether Indian soldiers could be sent to the forefront if their skins were less susceptible to nerve gas. This, of course, comes as part of a larger conspiracy where the British military tested chemical agents on their own troops.

Hundreds of British servicemen and women were subjected to chemical warfare trials up until 1989 at the Defense Ministry’s Porton Down research center in southwest England. Some of the those involved were exposed to mustard gas, nerve agents such as VX and GD, and hallucinogens such as LSD.

A couple of folks have emailed me asking for my opinion on this historical account and whether there should be more of an outrage in the light of these horrific atrocities inflicted on innocent Indians by the British empire.

My opinion of these incidents is that they are exactly what they are - history.

Of course, two wrongs don’t a right make. Just because the British tested the same on their own soldiers doesn’t make them any less guilty of testing chemical agents on soldiers from other nations. The gas chambers at Aushwitz come to mind but honestly comparing these tests by the British on a few Indian soldiers to Aushwitz would be doing a disservice to both sets of victims. To me if anything this reminds me of the chemical tests on humans performed by the Japanese army on Aussie POWs. To me this merely lends credence to the fact that World War II was not a struggle between evil and good as our history books make it out to be but rather a struggle between evil and the lesser evil.

But I’m not entirely certain what an outrage and cry campaign by desi bloggers and media and/or the Indian government will accomplish. Being that these tests were conducted in the 30s and 40s, there is a strong likelihood that there are no living survivors of these horrific atrocities today. Perhaps history books in India and the world over should be updated to accurately reflect the horrific entity that the British empire really was.

So what do our readers think about this story?

« India beat England to tie series [3 updates] :+: Udupi Palace, Tacoma Park, MD: A Review. »
Discuss in our off-topic forums