bengal famine (1943) [Archive]

dodger

8th October 2011, 22:29

This book may be of interest...Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II [Paperback]
Madhusree Mukerjee (Author)
A short review by William Podmore below might entice....Syd....I have yet to read the book myself but have it on order as several reviews and my Mother and father were there during the ww2 and spoke of it as horrendous. A Bengali teacher friend, a highly cultured woman spoke with fury at her own countrymen who had prospered from the famine, which surprised me at the time....not being aware of the full history...

Robert Clive had called Bengal `the paradise of the earth'. In 1757 Clive's forces conquered India. By 1770, there was a famine in which 3 million people died.

This brilliant book examines the 1943 famine in Bengal which killed 3.3 million people. British rule over India started and ended with a famine in Bengal.

Churchill did not mention the 1943 famine in his six volumes on the Second World War. He loved the Empire, but hated the peoples it ruled. As he wrote, "I therefore adopted quite early in life a system of believing whatever I wanted to believe ..." Churchill's private secretary John Colville reported that Churchill said, "the Hindus were a foul race" and wished that the head of Bomber Command would `send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them'.

Mukerjee observes, "During his 1930s campaign against Indian self-government, Churchill went so far as to warn of famine engulfing the United Kingdom if, `guided by counsels of madness and cowardice disguised as false benevolence, you troop home from India.' He feared that a full third of the English population would perish if the empire was lost."

In 1942 British forces arrested 90,000 Indians and killed an estimated 10,000. On 10 September 1942 Churchill broadcast the lie that the Indian National Congress had been helped by `Japanese fifth-column work'. In fact, as Churchill well knew, MI6 had been unable to find any evidence linking the Congress with the Japanese.

Viceroy Linlithgow told Bengal's elected Chief Minister Fazlul Huq in January 1943 that he "simply must produce some more rice out of Bengal for Ceylon even if Bengal itself went short!"

Mukerjee sums up, "Whereas India annually imported at least a million tons of rice and wheat before the war, it exported a net 360,000 tons during the fiscal year April 1, 1942, to March 31, 1943. ... On April 22, 1943, more than a month after it had been warned of famine, the Ministry of War Transport recorded with approval `continued pressure being brought to bear upon India to persuade her to release more than the previously agreed quotas of rice and, more recently, cargoes of wheat.' Between January and July of 1943, even as famine set in, India exported 71,000 tons of rice ..."

Throughout the famine, the British government rejected all international offers of aid. Significantly, there have been no famines in India since she won her independence, even with a growing population. (william podmore)