US anchor's spiel on British Raj leaves Shashi Tharoor 'redfaced' with anger

It was a comment which made even the normally affable Shashi Tharoor go red in the face with anger.

Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson in his tribute to Queen Elizabeth II played fast and loose with facts and colonial history saying the 'benign" British when they left India "left behind an entire civilisation."

"After 75 years of independence has that country [India] produced a single building as beautiful as the Bombay train station the British colonialists built? No sadly it has not. Not one," Carlson went on to say in his TV show, a small clip of which was shared on Twitter.


His reference here was to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) in Mumbai, which was earlier called the Victoria Terminus.

"You may many empires going forward, but you may never see one so benign," he said at the end of the 1:36 min clip.

Calson's spiel for the Raj angered many Indians on social media, among them Tharoor.

"I think @twitter ought to have an option for something to press when you can’t respond without losing your cool," the Thiruvananthapuram MP wrote , adding that for now he would use the angry emoji.

Tharoor has been a vocal critic of the British Raj, and across several television studios, both in India and abroad, dismantled brick by brick all such claims of "benign" colonialism.

Tharoor, for instance, has never tired of telling debaters that when British came to India it was one of the richest countries in the world, accounting for 27 per cent of global GDP in the 1700s, and when they left, India had just over 3 per cent of global GDP.