The cocktail party circuit talk in the Maximum City is about how one of these days a slice of POK will become a part of the Union of India. Those Indians who get excited at the thought of territorial acquisition would be shocked to hear that once upon a time, the whole of the Middle East was ruled from India. As Sam Dalrymple of the BBC explains:
“Although largely forgotten today, in the early 20th Century, nearly a third of the Arabian Peninsula was ruled as part of the British Indian Empire.
From Aden to Kuwait, a crescent of Arabian protectorates was governed from Delhi, overseen by the Indian Political Service, policed by Indian troops, and answerable to the Viceroy of India.
Under the Interpretation Act of 1889, these protectorates had all legally been considered part of India.
The standard list of India’s semi-independent princely states like Jaipur opened alphabetically with Abu Dhabi, and the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, even suggested that Oman should be treated “as much a Native State of the Indian Empire as Lus Beyla or Kelat [present day Balochistan]”.
Indian passports were issued as far west as Aden in modern Yemen, which functioned as India’s westernmost port and was administered as part of Bombay Province. When Mahatma Gandhi visited the city in 1931, he found many young Arabs identifying as Indian nationalists.”
It wasn’t until 1937 that “the first of several imperial partitions was enacted and Aden was separated from India… The Gulf remained under the purview of the Government of India for another decade, however…. The Gulf states, from Dubai to Kuwait, were thus finally separated from India on 1 April 1947, months before the Raj was itself divided into India and Pakistan and granted independence.”
What happened to the Gulf after India became independent in 1947 is even more interesting: “When British Prime Minister Clement Attlee proposed a British withdrawal from the Arabian territories at the same time as the withdrawal from India, he was shouted down. So, Britain retained its role in the Gulf for 24 more years, with an ‘Arabian Raj’ now reporting to Whitehall rather than to the Viceroy of India.
In the words of Gulf scholar Paul Rich, this was “the Indian Empire’s last redoubt, just as Goa was Portuguese India’s last solitary vestige, or Pondicherry was the tag-end of French India”.
The official currency was still the Indian rupee; the easiest mode of transport was still the ‘British India Line’ (shipping company) and the 30 Arabian princely states were still governed by ‘British residents’ who had made their careers in the Indian Political Service.
The British only finally pulled out of the Gulf in 1971 as part of its decision to abandon colonial commitments east of Suez.”
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