Analysis: How India has moved on since the Queen took the throne

Britain at that time, though less powerful than in the heyday of the Empire, was still a major world power. Why? Because in an increasingly young and forward-looking India, these “links of the past” are seen, when they are remembered at all, very differently. In the wake of the Queen’s passing, multiple young people who spoke to CNN in India’s capital New Delhi said they associated the monarchy with a colonial past that was marked by violence.”If you don’t see people mourning the death of Queen Elizabeth in India, (it is) because she doesn’t have that connection with the new generation of Indians,” Ravi Mishra said. “She was in a position of power for 70 years when she could have done a lot. You know, all the bad that the British did to this country and to the other countries around the world. She did nothing.” Sandeep Gandotra said the British “took everything from India.” “As Queen of Britain, she might have left some legacy for (Britons), not for India,” he said.Pooja Mehra called the situation “very unfortunate.” “A huge treasure has been taken away. I think our current leader is actually making an effort to get it back to India. I will be the first one to clap and rise and celebrate,” she said. And one of the most successful non-fiction books in recent years in India was called “An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India.” (Its title, when it was published in the UK, was “Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India.”) Written by the Indian writer and Congress Party politician Shashi Tharoor, it tells the story of how Britain’s plunder of India fueled its rise. The book followed a speech Tharoor gave during an Oxford Union debate in 2015 — arguing for the motion that “Britain Owes Reparations to Her Former Colonies” — that went viral, with at last count more than 9.6 million views on YouTube. Importantly, Tharoor wasn’t arguing for a particular monetary sum. “We are not arguing specifically that vast sums of money need to be paid. The proposition before this house is the principle of owing reparations … the question is: is there a debt?… As far as I’m concerned, the ability to acknowledge a wrong that has been done, to simply say sorry, will go a far, far, far longer way than some percentage of GDP in the form of aid,” Tharoor said. He added: “Personally, I’d be quite happy if it was one pound a year for the next 200 years after the last 200 years of Britain and India.” CNN’s Rishabh Madhavendra Pratap contributed reporting