PIO peer calls for Clive of India statue in front of London’s foreign office to be pulled down | India News

LONDON: An Indian-heritage Labour peer has called for the statue of Clive of India outside the foreign office in London to be pulled down due to the role he played at the East India Company laying the groundwork for the British Raj.“I’m not sure that a statue of Clive should really have any place outside of the foreign office. Clive was one of the early architects of the British empire in India. He landed in Chennai, where my family is from. The frieze on the side of the statue shows happy smiling at people looking really delighted to see him. It is not historically accurate and not helpful for our current relationship with India,” Baroness Debonnaire said.“It is deeply unhelpful to see India as a country that Britain civilised. India had a thriving engineering industry in the 17th century — it knew about mineral extraction, it had incredible technological advances. It knew about free trade before free trade agreements were written. That was all closed down by an extractive colonising force. It is also a shocking sculpture,” she said.“What is pictured on that statue is tiny, tiny little Indians who are kind of subservient and incidental to their own national story, and then a great big picture of Clive on a horse.”One of the bronze friezes shows Clive receiving the grant of Bengal at Allahabad in 1765.Debonnaire, born to a father of Indian and Sri Lankan heritage and an English mother, was speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. A former Labour MP, she previously represented the Bristol constituency where the Edward Colston statue was pulled down in 2020 during a Black Lives Matter protest.TOI understands that the foreign office has no plans to remove the 1912 statue by John Tweed, which is the responsibility of English Heritage. A marble statue of Clive, also by Tweed, still stands in Kolkata.The only other statue of Clive in the UK is in Shrewsbury. There were petitions to pull it down, and a counter petition to keep it, in 2020. Shropshire Council kept it and instead erected an interpretation board next to it which says “Lord Clive’s activities on behalf of the East India Company and the profits extracted both by the Company and him personally, resulted in the plundering of India. They inflicted famine, poverty and other atrocities upon the native population.”