The conquest and annexation of Sind in 1843, a spin-off of the reinvasion of Afghanistan, did nothing to quell such doubts. Major-General Sir Charles Napier frankly admitted that ‘we have no right to seize Scinde’; yet he actively ‘bullied’ (his own word) the Sindis into hostilities and then conducted what he called this ‘very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality’ with maximum brutality. It contravened a sheaf of treaties, themselves signed under duress, which had previously been concluded with the various rulers, or ‘amirs’, of Sind, and it incurred almost universal condemnation in Britain. The story that Napier, in one of the shortest telegraphs ever sent, announced his victory with a single Latin verb is apparently apocryphal. ‘Peccavi’ (meaning ‘I have sinned [i.e. Sind]’), was not unworthy of Napier’s wit, but it was in fact the caption given him by the magazine Punch; ‘and Punch represented him as confessing that he had sinned because the deposition of the Amirs and the seizure of their territories raised such a storm of criticism in England’.
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