Elohim Global Worship Centre in Kerala, known for fraudulent miracle-healing shows in which Pastor Binu Vazhamuttam claims to cure fatal illnesses by driving devils out of bodies “in the name of Jesus”, is now facing a child abuse case
According to a police complaint filed by a minor boy, he began living at the centre after his parents were told that he would be provided with education and job
But he was subjected to physical assault, forced labour, lack of education
Three managers have been arrested
These kinds of centres have now proliferated across north as well. We @RashtraJyoti@sewanyaya exposed one such, Zion Global Worship Centre, in Delhi’s West Patel Nagar where pamphlets were being distributed in local jhuggis asking them to accept Jesus as their saviour for relief from all diseases and debts and join the centre
NYC Mayor Mandani was angry about Israel eliminating Ahmed Wishah, an Al Jazeera “journalist” yesterday.
This is him. 👇
Does he seem an innocent “journalist” to you?
How Britain Engineered History’s Greatest Financial Heist
By @shreehistory
I. The Stroke of Midnight
At the stroke of midnight on August 14, 1947, as the world watched the Union Jack descend over New Delhi and the saffron, white, and green of a new nation unfurl, history recorded a triumph of self-determination. The British Empire, exhausted by war and weakened by the inexorable tide of nationalism, was relinquishing its crown jewel. The romanticized narrative of the 20th century tells us that Britain granted India its freedom, an act of political magnanimity marking the end of colonial dominion.
But beneath the pageantry of lowering flags, the soaring rhetoric of Jawaharlal Nehru’s "Tryst with Destiny," and the chaotic tragedy of Partition, a very different kind of transfer was taking place. It was not a transfer of political power, but of financial liability.
In the quiet, wood-paneled chambers of the British Treasury and the Reserve Bank of India, a ledger was being closed. To the accountants and chancellors in London, Indian independence was less a geopolitical retreat and more a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, a meticulously orchestrated maneuver by which Britain effectively declared independence from its own creditor.
The colonizer owed the colonized a staggering fortune. And the colonizer was broke.
II. The First Extraction and the Silencing
To understand the audacity of the financial maneuvering of 1947, one must look back to the blueprint drafted three decades earlier, during the First World War. The great financial heist of the mid-century was not an anomaly; it was the perfection of a formula born in the trenches of Europe, paid for in the fields of Bengal.
When the First World War erupted in 1914, Britain found itself in desperate need of men, material, and money. It turned to its empire. India was coerced into contributing hundreds of millions of pounds to the British war effort, alongside the lives of over a million Indian soldiers. To finance this, the British Raj effectively commandeered India’s export earnings and heavily increased taxation, flooding the domestic economy with paper currency while draining its physical gold reserves. Britain abandoned the gold standard, but India was forced to maintain it, absorbing the inflationary shock.
By the war's end, the economic strain on the Indian populace was immense. Prices of essential goods had skyrocketed, and the returns on the capital extracted for the war were nowhere to be seen. As the Indian public began to realize the scale of this economic theft, dissent began to boil. Nationalist leaders pointed to the economic drain, exposing the arithmetic of imperial exploitation.
London’s response was not to remedy the extraction, but to legislate silence. In 1919, the British government passed the Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act, widely known as the Rowlatt Act. The Act allowed for the incarceration of suspects without trial and curbed the free press, specifically targeting the dissemination of seditious materials, which in practice meant anyone explaining how the British were bankrupting the country. When protests erupted against this silencing, the British military responded with the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, killing hundreds of unarmed civilians.
The message was unequivocal: the colony would pay, and it would suffer in silence. The economic truth was to be suppressed by force. It was a precedent that would prove vital 28 years later, when the sums involved would be exponentially larger.
III. The Blank Check of World War II
By the time the Second World War began, the British Empire was already financially strained. The defense of the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the British Isles required capital that London simply did not possess. Once again, the British turned to the vast, seemingly bottomless reservoir of the Indian economy.
To fund the massive mobilization of troops, the provisioning of armies, and the purchase of raw materials, the British Raj essentially wrote itself a blank check against the Indian taxpayer. India was declared a "non-self-governing territory" contributing to the war effort, but instead of paying India in hard currency for the goods and labor extracted, Britain credited the Reserve Bank of India with pounds sterling. These were not transferable funds; they were essentially IOUs, piling up in London as "Sterling Balances."
The human cost of this capital extraction was catastrophic. The most visceral manifestation of this economic drain was the Bengal Famine of 1943. While the British Treasury accumulated sterling balances, the diversion of grain and the financial extraction policies led to the starvation of an estimated two to three million people in Bengal. The Indian taxpayer was literally funding the survival of the British Empire with their lives and their livelihoods.
By 1945, the sheer scale of this extraction was breathtaking. Britain owed India roughly £1.3 billion. To comprehend the magnitude of this sum, one must view it not through the lens of modern consumer inflation, but as a share of the economy. In 1947, £1.3 billion represented roughly 13.5 percent of Britain’s entire Gross Domestic Product. If the British Treasury were forced to write a check for that proportion of its economy today, it would need to find approximately £350 billion.
It was a sum so massive that paying it in full would have instantly bankrupted post-war Britain, a nation that was, at that very moment, surviving on American Marshall Plan aid and rationed bread. The colonizer owed the colonized. And the colonizer had no intention of paying in full.
IV. The Safety Valve and the Negotiation
Facing the prospect of domestic economic collapse, the British government executed an audacious maneuver. The transfer of power in 1947 was not merely a political act; it was a financial release valve.
There is a historical curiosity, often unspoken in popular narratives, that complicates the story of India’s independence. The Indian National Congress (INC), the primary vehicle of Indian nationalism and independence, was not born from a grassroots peasant uprising, but was initially floated by a British colonial official, Allan Octavian Hume, in 1885. Historians have long debated the "safety valve" theory: the idea that Hume and the Viceroy engineered the creation of the INC to provide a controlled, institutional outlet for the rising frustrations of the Western-educated Indian elite, preventing a violent, uncontrollable rebellion.
While the INC evolved into a formidable force for independence under Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru, the institutional DNA of the organization was steeped in British legal and political frameworks. When it came time to negotiate the financial settlement of 1947, the lingering effects of this "safety valve" dynamic became apparent.
The negotiations over the Sterling Balances were brutal, conducted behind closed doors by the British Labour government’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps, and the Indian delegation led by Nehru and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. Britain argued that a sudden withdrawal of £1.3 billion would crash the pound sterling, bankrupt the Sterling Area, and trigger a global financial crisis. The threat was explicit: if India demanded its money, the ensuing chaos would ensure India received nothing.
India was in a state of profound vulnerability. The subcontinent was engulfed in the horrific trauma of Partition; millions of refugees were on the move, and the new government was struggling to establish basic administrative continuity. In this moment of existential crisis, the Indian leadership accepted terms that effectively castrated its own wealth.
The 1947 agreement dictated that the vast majority of the £1.3 billion would be "blocked." Only a fraction was immediately released; the remaining £1.15 billion was locked in London, to be doled out in agonizingly slow installments over a decade or more. Worse, the agreement stipulated that these blocked balances would earn little to no interest. By accepting this compromise, the post-colonial government effectively agreed to a structural haircut on the asset, surrendering the real-time economic utility of the money to save the British economy from default.
The safety valve had, once again, operated exactly as designed.
V. The Alchemy of Devaluation
With India's massive claim successfully trapped in the vaults of the Bank of England, Britain weaponized the only tool it had left: the currency itself.
Having forced India to accept deferred payments, Britain engineered a stealth default through the alchemy of foreign exchange. On September 18, 1949, just over two years after Indian independence, the British government unilaterally announced a massive devaluation of the pound sterling. The pound’s value against the US dollar was slashed overnight from $4.03 to $2.80, a devaluation of 30.5 percent.
Because India’s sterling balances were, by the very terms of the 1947 agreement, denominated in pounds, this overnight maneuver was an economic earthquake. It instantly vaporized almost one-third of the purchasing power of the money owed to India. If India wanted to use those sterling balances to buy American machinery, Canadian wheat, or Swiss capital goods, they would find that nearly a third of their money had vanished into the ether.
Britain, on the other hand, enjoyed a sudden, massive windfall. The real value of the debt owed to India was slashed by a third with the stroke of a pen. India was bound by the Sterling Area agreement and had to devalue the rupee proportionately, tying its currency to the declining fortunes of the British pound and further devastating its import capacity. It was a financial ambush, executed with the cold precision of an actuary.
VI. The Central Bank’s Quiet Payout
As if this financial evisceration was not sufficient, the final insult was administered at the very heart of India’s financial system.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the nation's central bank, had been established in 1935 under British colonial rule as a privately owned entity. Its shareholders were a mix of private banks, financiers, and investors, a group that included substantial British and colonial-era capital.
Just after independence, the Indian government recognized the strategic necessity of nationalizing the central bank. The RBI (Transfer to Public Ownership) Act was passed in 1948, and the bank was officially nationalized on January 1, 1949.
The terms of this nationalization reveal a profound asymmetry in the post-colonial transition. When the Indian government took ownership of the RBI, it did not simply seize the assets. It compensated the private shareholders handsomely. Under Section 4 of the 1948 Act, the compensation was calculated not at a discounted state rate but based on the average market price of the shares on the Bombay Stock Exchange during the months preceding the Act. Because RBI shares, with a face value of one hundred rupees, were trading at a premium of roughly fifty percent on the open market, the total payout from the Indian exchequer to the 500,000 private shares was approximately 7.5 crores.
But the generosity of the settlement did not end with a cash buyout. Under Section 4(2) of the Act, the shareholders were given the option to take their compensation in Government of India promissory notes bearing a guaranteed interest rate of three percent per annum. This was a staggering mechanism of financial alchemy. The British and colonial-era investors were effectively allowed to convert their equity in India's central bank into risk-free sovereign debt backed by the newly independent Indian taxpayer. They could hold these 3 percent government papers and collect a perpetual stream of interest, ensuring that the extraction of wealth from the subcontinent continued long after the political transfer of power.
The juxtaposition is staggering, bordering on the absurd. Private shareholders of India’s central bank were paid out in full, at peak market valuations, and handed guaranteed interest-bearing bonds. Meanwhile, the Indian public, who had already paid for Britain’s survival in two world wars through forced extraction and inflation, was left holding devalued, blocked IOUs that had just lost a third of their value in the currency markets.
The private investors were made whole. The Indian public was made paupers.
VII. The Durgapur Paradigm: The Empire Strikes Back
The long shadow of this financial subjugation played out in the subsequent decades, dictating the trajectory of the newly independent nation’s development.
By the late 1950s, India had launched its Second Five-Year Plan, an ambitious push to industrialize. But the country was facing a severe balance-of-payments crisis. The sterling balances had been largely drawn down to pay for essential imports, and the country was running out of foreign exchange. India needed to build three major steel plants to fuel its industrialization. The Soviet Union stepped in to fund the Bhilai Steel Plant; West Germany funded the Rourkela plant. Britain, eager to maintain its commercial foothold, wanted the contract for the Durgapur Steel Plant.
Rather than releasing any lingering goodwill or acknowledging the massive debt still technically being dribbled out, Britain offered a new arrangement. In 1958, the UK government extended a fresh £100 million loan, a "new" line of sterling credit, to India.
This was not a repayment of the wartime debt; it was fresh financing. The British government essentially told India: We will lend you this new money, but you must use it to buy British goods. The money flowed straight back into the pockets of a British consortium of steelmakers, subsidizing the post-war British heavy engineering industry.
The Indian taxpayer, who had already funded the British war machine, was now taking on new debt to buy British machinery, because the money they were originally owed had been blocked, devalued, and structurally dismantled. The cycle of financial dependency had been perfectly preserved.
VIII. Amnesia and the True Cost of the Union Jack
Today, the historical amnesia surrounding these events is profound. The narrative of 1947 is frozen in the amber of political triumph: the lowering of the flag, the end of empire, the dawn of a new era. Mainstream histories focus on the geopolitical maneuvering, the tragedy of Partition, and the drafting of a constitution. The great financial heist remains obscured in the shadows of central bank archives and Treasury minutes.
The Indian population has been kept largely in the dark about the arithmetic of their own subjugation. The textbooks speak of the political transfer of power, but rarely of the transfer of financial liability. The £350 billion equivalent that was extracted, blocked, devalued, and systematically stripped of its value is a phantom limb in the national memory.
When the viceroys departed, Britain did not just walk away from the subcontinent; it walked away from an invoice it could not afford to pay. It declared independence from its own empire. Through a masterclass in financial engineering, leveraging the Rowlatt-era instinct for suppression, the "safety valve" of institutional compromise by a party supposedly fought for freedom and did deals behind the doors, the blunt instrument of currency devaluation, and the quiet payouts of risk-free bonds to colonial shareholders, Britain managed to offload the cost of its own survival onto the very people it had colonized.
Independence was not a gift. It was a getaway car. And the true price of the Union Jack's descent was paid not by the British taxpayer, but by the millions of Indians whose sweat and starvation funded an empire, only to be handed a worthless IOU in return.
References and Further Reading
Bhattacharya, S. (1997). The Colonial State and the Monetary System in India. Oxford University Press.
Bhowani, B. R. (1965). India's Sterling Balances. International Monetary Fund (IMF) Staff Papers, Vol. 12, No. 1, pp. 1-42.
Chandavarkar, A. (1989). The Imperial Bank of India and the Reserve Bank of India: A Study in Central Banking Transition. Oxford University Press.
Datta, B. (1949). The Devaluation of the Rupee. The Indian Economic Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-12.
Hume, A. O. (1885). The Indian National Congress: A Retrospect.
Keynes, J. M. (1946). The Balance of Payments of the United Kingdom.
Mukerjee, M. (2010). Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II. Basic Books.
Reserve Bank of India. (1948). The Reserve Bank of India (Transfer to Public Ownership) Act, 1948. RBI Historical Archives.
Sarkar, S. (1989). Modern India: 1885-1947. Macmillan.
Tomlinson, B. R. (1979). The Political Economy of the Raj 1914–1947: The Economics of Decolonization in India. Macmillan.
(All rights reserved. You must get written permission if you want to republish)
Twitter users can share, repost, like, comment but please provide attribution to @shreehistory who did all this research.
Situation 1:
A Hindu woman praises the Madarsa for the warm welcome and thoughtful refreshments she received while waiting there as her ward appeared for the NEET exam.
Situation 2:
An incident of molestation of a minor child in Madarsa.
I strongly condemn the mischivous term "two nations" in Amb Gor's statement. Joseph Vijay must immediately rebut Amb in his X. All nationalist forces in & out of TN must condemn this. This cannot be a slip. A diplomat like Gor won't use such a term workout deep thought
They want 24x7 electricity, but oppose solar, dams, and nuclear energy.
They want a secure rare-earth supply chain, but the moment mining is mentioned, the protests begin.
They want to enjoy the fruits, but refuse to plant the tree.
This is the ecosystem we're dealing with.
- PM Modi brutally exposed the Left ecosystem... 😹
Existing FCRA associations have one year to specify their purposes under the new schedule, while a pending bill proposes government control over assets held by organisations whose registrations are cancelled, surrendered or allowed to lapse.
https://t.co/rSyQUyh9tz
Dear @BJP4Bengal and @BJP4India, yes, it IS your prerogative to include any rubbish you want in the party, and what I say is clearly irrelevant, but as a citizen, supporter and voter, if THIS toxic piece of shit comes in, I am pressing NOTA in 2029!
This was Indian Army General Arun Shridhar Vaidya. In 1984, Operation Blue Star in Amritsar was conducted under his leadership. After the operation, Khalistani militants threatened to kill him, and in 1986, after his retirement, he was shot dead in Pune. The biggest tragedy is that after retirement, the government provided him with only one local policeman for security. The Army had even informed the Home Ministry that General Vaidya’s life was under threat, but no action was taken. Today, you see that even the wife of an MLA moves around shopping with 3-4 policemen for her security. What an incompetent and worthless government that was.
Based on the information found in the memoir Jibaner Smritidipe ("In the Lamp of Memory") by the eminent historian Dr. Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, the following is a brief account of a remarkable and dramatic chapter from his tenure as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Dhaka.
During Dr. Ramesh Chandra Majumdar's tenure as Vice-Chancellor, Hindus in East Bengal were frequently subjected to communal attacks. Recalling one such episode, he wrote about a devastating communal riot that engulfed the city of Dhaka. As bloodshed and cries of despair echoed across the city, hundreds of displaced Hindu men, women, and children sought refuge in the Hindu hostels of the university. In this moment of grave crisis, Dr. Majumdar's administrative skill and impartiality shone brightly. Yet, alongside him emerged another towering figure, a fearless and timeless hero: Dr. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the renowned leader of the Hindu Mahasabha.
On the fourth day of the riots, defying both government restrictions and strong opposition from influential Muslim leaders, Syama Prasad flew to Dhaka with unwavering determination. When the Commissioner urged him to return to Calcutta for his own safety, he firmly refused, declaring that he was prepared to face any danger in order to fulfill the promise he had made to his mother and to stand beside people in distress. The residence of Vice-Chancellor Ramesh Chandra Majumdar soon became his stronghold. That very night, information emerged about a sinister plot to assassinate Syama Prasad by poisoning his food through a Muslim cook. Undeterred by the threat, the fearless leader remained steadfast, and thanks to the vigilance of the Vice-Chancellor's family, the conspiracy was foiled.
That same night, one of Dhaka's wealthiest residents arrived at the Vice-Chancellor's residence seeking shelter, carrying fifty thousand rupees in cash out of fear for his life. Syama Prasad, displaying his characteristic sense of duty and leadership, reminded him that the Hindu Mahasabha had been founded precisely to protect Hindus in times of crisis. Ironically, after reaching safety, the wealthy man failed to fulfill his promise of financial support, revealing a degree of self-interest that stood in stark contrast to Syama Prasad's selfless dedication to others.
The following day, overcoming every obstacle, Dr. Syama Prasad Mukherjee ventured onto the streets of Dhaka under the Commissioner's protection. He met not only Hindu leaders but also prominent Muslim figures, including the Nawab of Dhaka. Through his resolute yet farsighted efforts, peace gradually returned to the troubled city. In the writings of Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, Syama Prasad Mukherjee appears not merely as a political leader, but as a heroic figure who emerged like a guardian angel amid the darkness of crisis.
On the anniversary of the passing of this great son of India, I offer my heartfelt tributes and deepest respect to his memory.
UP- मुजफ्फरनगर के SSP संजय वर्मा के हाथ में जो हथियार है उससे जानवरों की तरह बंधक बनाये गये मजदूरों को टार्चर किया जाता था.
अंकित बालियान नाम के गुंडे ने अपनी दोना फैक्ट्री में एक दर्जन मजदूर कई साल से बंधक बनाये हुए थे. उनको कुछ घंटे पहले मुक्त कराया गया तो उनकी हालत जानवरों से बदतर थी.
किसी के शरीर पर बेतहाशा चोटों के निशान थे तो किसी को मार-मारकर हाथ-पांव सुजा दिये गये थे. फैक्ट्री में काम के बाद लॉकअप में मजदूरों को बंद रखा जाता था. 24 घंटे में एक बार खाना मिलता था और खाने में होती थी चोकर की रोटी, नमक और हरी मिर्च. यूपी के अलग-अलग इलाकों से इन मजदूरों को 12 हजार रूपये वेतन का लालच देकर लाया गया था.
पुलिस जांच में यह भी पाया गया कि अंकित बालियान की थर्ड डिग्री से टार्चर करके 3 मजदूरों को मार डाला. मारे गये एक मजदूर की शनाख्त कर ली गयी है.
I am Deeply humbled and profoundly grateful, and truly honored to be conferred with the Padma Shri.
My heartfelt gratitude to the Government of India for bestowing upon me one of our nation’s highest civilian honors. I am equally thankful to the Government of Maharashtra for recommending my name and placing their faith in my journey. This recognition is something I will cherish for the rest of my life.
To every person who watched my films, embraced my characters, celebrated my successes, forgave my shortcomings, and stood by me through the years—this honor belongs as much to you as it does to me. Your affection has been the driving force behind every milestone in my life and career.
Today, I also feel a deep sense of responsibility. This recognition reminds me that every privilege carries with it a greater duty—to uphold the values of integrity, humility, and excellence; to contribute meaningfully to the world of cinema that has given me everything; and to serve my country in whatever way I can.
I dedicate this honor to the magical world of cinema, to every artist and technician who has walked alongside me and to my family who have been my strength…
From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
Jai Hind. 🇮🇳🙏😊