Will Durant describes how the British Indian Army's upkeep would be used to catastrophically impoverish regular Indians while the Army subdued nations abroad: "The Indian forces number some 204,000 men; 60,000 of them are British, including all officers; 1,874 are aviators—the last resort of despotism. There are only a few Hindu officers, and no Hindu is allowed in the air force or the artillery, but 70% of the common soldiery is natives. The Hindus are reputed by the British to be incapable of self-defense, but no British Government has been willing to believe this to the extent of allowing Hindus to learn the art of incorporated murder. The expense of maintaining this army, whose function is the continual subjection of India by bullets, shells, and air bombs, is borne by the Indian people. In 1926, its cost was $200,735,660—a tax of 3% on the scanty earnings of every man, woman, and child in the land. Wherever the Indian army sheds its (mostly native) blood, in Afghanistan or Burma or Mesopotamia or France (for the government is free to send it anywhere), the expense is met not by the Empire which it enlarges of defends, but by Indian revenues alone. When England had to send British troops to India in 1857 it charged India with the cost not only of transporting them, maintaining them in India, and bringing them back home, but with their maintenance in Great Britain for six months before they sailed. During the nineteenth century India paid $450,000,000 for wars fought for England outside of India with Indian troops. She contributed $500,000,000 to the War chest of the Allies, $700,000,000 in subscriptions to War loans, 800,000 soldiers, and 400,000 laborers to defend the British Empire outside of India during the Great War. In 1922, 64% of the total revenue of India was devoted to this army of fratricides: Hindus compelled to kill Hindus in Burma until Burma consented to come under British rule; Hindus compelled to defend on the fields of Flanders the Empire which in every year, as will appear later, was starving ten million Hindus to death. No other army in the world consumes so large a proportion of the public revenues. In 1926 the Viceroy announced the intention of the Government to build a "Royal Indian Navy"; the proposal added that this navy should be used wherever in the Empire the British Parliament might care to send it, and that the entire cost of the navy should be met from the revenues of India. It pays to be free." #TheCaseForIndiaTE