KARACHI:
Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay studied law and served as Britain’s Secretary to the Board of Control. His primary job was to supervise the administration of India via the East India Company. Later on, he served as the Secretary of War.
‘Macaulay’s children’ is a term that refers to those people who are born of Indian ancestry but adopt Western cultures and display attitudes that have been heavily influenced by colonialism. These ‘children’ are considered as remnants of those that were disloyal to the country and hence were recruited in the Indian bureaucracy to serve the interests of the Raj. His final years in India were devoted to the creation of a Penal Code in 1860 to counter Indian Mutiny of 1857, which laid the basis of the Criminal Procedure Code, 1872 and Civil Procedure Code, 1908.
Macaulay advocated the right of Britain to administer its colonies in an autocratic fashion. He was instrumental in creating the Indian bureaucracy and in helping the Raj prolong its rule in India. The ghost of Macaulay continues to haunt the corridors of power even today. Recently, the FIA resorted to an archaic colonial law to win a case in the Islamabad High Court. The IHC Chief Justice questioned the state for resorting to such black laws. One wonders why such outdated colonial laws continue to be part of our legal framework.
How can any government justify the retainment and use of repressive laws enacted to govern an occupied colony? Seventy years have passed since we gained independence, and yet we seem to be stuck in the past. Such black laws have no place in Jinnah’s Pakistan. Our past mistakes have left a legacy of terrorism, extremism and ethnic strife that haunts the lives of 220 million citizens today. We must not repeat them.
Malik Tariq Ali
Lahore
Published in The Express Tribune, September 29th, 2021.
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