Indian-origin peer reignites calls to remove Clive statue outside UK Foreign Office

A House of Lords peer has reignited calls for the statue of controversial colonial figure Robert Clive to be removed from outside the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) headquarters on King Charles Street in London, as it is “unhelpful” to Britain’s relationship with India.

Baroness Thangam Debbonaire, born to a father of Tamil heritage, was speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival over the weekend when she questioned the continued commemoration of a man associated with establishing Britain’s colonial domination in 18th-century India.

The Labour Party parliamentarian was addressing a panel entitled ‘Freedom of Expression: The Long View’ when she decried the “culture wars” that restrict the discussion of history with a clear-eyed view, making it problematic for the UK’s contemporary relationship with former colonies.

“I’m not sure that a statue of Clive should really have any place outside the Foreign Office,” Debbonaire said.

“I walk past the statue... Clive was one of the early architects of the British Empire in India. He landed in Madras region, which is where my family are from – it was called Madras, it is now called Chennai, and the frieze on the side of the statue shows happy smiling people really delighted to see him,” said the former Labour shadow secretary of state for culture.

“That is just not historically accurate. And that’s not helpful for our current relationship between India and Britain. It’s deeply unhelpful to see India as a country that Britain civilised,” she said.

The House of Lords peer went on to highlight India’s thriving engineering industry well before it was colonised under Clive’s East India Company leadership during the Battle of Plassey in 1757.

“It (India) knew about mineral extraction, it had all sorts of really quite incredible technological advances, it knew about free trade before free trade agreements were ever written. That was all closed down by an extractive colonising force,” she reflected.

Referencing the work of politician-author Shashi Tharoor, Debbonaire said a form of reparations for colonialism would be “truthfulness” about such issues, which did not have to involve any acknowledgement of guilt because “people right now are not guilty of doing those things”.

Even as a piece of sculpture, which was unveiled in 1912, Debbonaire said it was “really bad” and pointed to the depiction of “tiny, tiny little Indians who are kind of subservient and incidental to their own national story” while a “great big Clive” looms over them.

Clive, known as Clive of India, remains a divisive figure with historian-author William Dalrymple among other prominent figures who have called for the statue, near Downing Street in London, to be removed.

“It is not just that this statue stands as a daily challenge to every British person whose grandparents came from the former colonies. Perhaps more damagingly still, its presence outside the Foreign Office encourages dangerous neo-imperial fantasies among the descendants of the colonisers,” Dalrymple wrote in the ‘Guardian’ a few years ago.

The author of ‘The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company’, who refers to Clive as “Lord Vulture”, has called for the statue by Scottish sculptor John Tweed to be moved to a museum.

According to English Heritage, the charity which manages historic monuments in England, the impetus for the commission of Clive's statue came from Lord Curzon – Viceroy of India between 1899-1905.

The narrative panels on three sides of the plinth, which Curzon had reportedly insisted upon, depict scenes including the eve of the Battle of Plassey.

The inscription below the towering bronze sculpture reads “CLIVE 1725-1774” and depicts the former governor of Bengal with one foot forward, his left hand resting on his sword, and his right grasping some papers.

Another similar statue of Clive in his birthplace of Shrewsbury in Shropshire, western England, was saved from removal amid protests back in July 2020.

After Shropshire Council received two petitions with over 23,000 signatures demanding the “racist” statue’s removal, it concluded that it should be kept in place in the town square to educate people about Clive’s life, enabling them to “form their own opinions about his deeds or misdeeds”.