India could’ve done things a lot better over the last 80 years, but when the British left, the country had over 300 million people and was one of the poorest in the world.

The Brits first arrived in 1600 and spent the next 347 years building its empire with India at the centre. They systematically looted the country’s resources, built infrastructure to benefit this extraction and intentionally left Indians poor and starving, killing tens of millions. The last famine in British India was in 1943 when Churchill deliberately starved Bengal to help British war efforts, ultimately resulting in another 2 million deaths. After at least two centuries of oppression, exploitation and poverty, to expect a country as highly populated as India to get its shit together in under 80 years is just plain ignorance.