Er... Pigeon Stools

PERHAPS Sir Charles James Napier should remain standing at London's touristy spot of Trafalgar Square, immortalised as he remains under everlasting droppings of pigeons. London Mayor Ken Livingstone's plans to remove his statue along with that of Sir Henry Havelock from Trafalgar would cheat the British of a half-chance to know what stuff some of their heroes were made of.
It was to honour their conquests in India in the Raj era that the 4.5-metre-tall statues came to stand on the plinth at Trafalgar Square. Napier was honoured for his conquest of Sind. A conquest that came after he had declared "we have no right to seize Scinde". He went ahead, however, as he said, to "bully" the Amirs of Sind into a confrontation and then led a conquest which he described as "very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality". The conquest over, he sent a one-word pun in Latin to his headquarters saying he had "sinned" (Sind). Typically British, you'd say.
But it wasn't really a story of quaint English puns. There's more the man said, back in the last but one century. "Fools! We have the physical force, not they. They talk of their hundreds of thousands of men. Who is to move them when I am dancing around them with cavalry, and pelting them with cannon shot? What would their 100,000 men do with my 100 rockets wriggling their fiery tails among them, roaring, scorching, tearing, smashing all they come near?... Poor men! Poor men! How little they know of physical force."
This is a face of the Englishman that must be commemorated by a monument recognised by locals, seen by visitors and anointed by pigeons. And the other general, Sir Henry Havelock? He did more than his bit by suppressing the 1857 uprising, or as the British see it, the 1857 mutiny. Sir Havelock failed to save Cawnpore and failed thrice to take Lucknow. He succeeded the fourth time, and brutally.
It's these ‘stoned' gentlemen Livingstone wants to move to a site "by the river", though some would insist it be into the river. Of course, the old military battalions want to keep the generals where they are.
But this isn't really a debate between colonialists and modernisers. Or about Britain forgetting its imperial past to forge peace in a more global present. This is a debate between ignorance and general knowledge. Livingstone wants them moved because he says, "I have not a clue who two of the generals there are." Move them not because they were bad; move them because, well, who were they to be at Trafalgar?

The generals surfaced in what was a debate on pigeons within the Greater London Assembly. It's the pigeons Livingstone wanted out of Trafalgar Square, really, on grounds of health. Amid protests by animal lovers he said: "You get the impression from some of the protests that we could keep these pigeons alive until they qualified for an old-age pension." And talking of people, he said: "I think that the people on the plinths in the main square of our capital should be identifiable to the generality of the population. I have not a clue who two of the generals there are or what they did."

One member of the Assembly apparently did know something. "One was very good in the Afghan war," he said. It's another matter still that the Afghan wars did not go very well for the British. Livingstone picked on this nearest shot to knowledge about the two statues. "I imagine that not one person in 10,000 going through Trafalgar Square knows any details about the lives of those two generals.It might be that it is time to look at moving them and having figures on those plinths that ordinary Londoners and people from around the world would know."
Such as? And here lies the problem. Who do you move in? One of the four plinths at the Square has been vacant and it has been impossible for 150 years now to agree on who should be put there. One local group has suggested Gandhi. That would be a departure from the military rulers who established the Raj Gandhi fought to break.
The last word in the debate, and with it the last laugh, went to Livingstone: clear the pigeons and put up a statue of The Unknown Pigeon. n
Sanjay Suri in London