British South Asian communities have their own complex relationship with British colonial history. The Indian subcontinent was subject to British rule for nearly two centuries. The East India Company, and later the Crown, extracted enormous wealth from India. The Bengal Famine of 1943, in which millions died, occurred under British administration. The partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 produced one of the largest and most violent mass migrations in history.
British South Asian people carry their own history of colonial harm. They are not, by any logical reckoning, people who inherited the benefits of the Atlantic slave trade. Including them in a reparations levy on grounds of skin colour is an incoherence that the reparations campaign never addresses.
