When Winston Churchill died in 1965 his passing was not universally mourned across the United Kingdom. In the South Wales and Forest of Dean coalfields he was seen not as a victorious war leader but as a vicious class warrior. In 1910 he sent in troops to smash the resistance of workers in Tonypandy – a decision that left one dead and 500 injured and drove the miners back to work after a ten month strike. But the survivors of the Bengal famine in 1943 have infinitely stronger cause to loathe and detest the man than mining communities in Britain.
In the winter of 1943-44 between 1.5 million and 3.5 million Indians died of starvation. At the time an official Committee of Inquiry, whose members were conveniently handpicked by the then Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery, concluded that a “mere” 700,000 perished and laid the blame entirely at the door of “local” factors. They blamed farmers and merchants for hoarding rice and the people for refusing to eat wheat. It was, they concluded, an unavoidable tragedy. The reality was very different.
The Second World War was a series of interlocking conflicts that shared little in common. The war in Europe was initially a struggle against totalitarianism, but then Hitler attacked Stalin and it became more complicated. In Asia it was a war of empires and, for some, a war of national liberation. In India the Japanese were at the gate with the occupation of Burma and a civil war threatened as Subhas Chandra Bose’s Jananese-equipped Indian National Army threatened to enter the country alongside the Imperial Japanese Army and fight against Britain’s Indian troops. Churchill did not want the jewel in the crown to be lost on his watch. He would defend the British Empire to the last Indian.
Britain had been bleeding India dry, shipping goods to the Middle East for the British and Indian battalions there, using the country for the production of war materials in and exporting huge quantities of rice to Sri Lanka. The result in India was too much money chasing too few goods. In October 1942 Bengal was struck by a cyclone that severely damaged the harvest. The British were also practising a scorched earth policy of removing food and destroying shipping to deny them to the Japanese in what was felt to be an imminent invasion. The combination was lethal. For many in the countryside food was unavailable, for others merely inaccessible, as inflation put it beyond their meagre resources even when they sold everything they had, including their daughters.
The answer, obviously, was deliveries of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rice or wheat. Both the shipping and the cereals were available. Amery and the British authorities in India asked – and then begged – for help. To no avail. Churchill’s distaste for the Indians was only exceeded by that of his scientific adviser Lord Cherwell, whose enthusiastic social Darwinism and eugenics would have made Josef Goebbels blush. Lecturing in the 1930s, he condemned any attempt “to force upon nature an equality she has never admitted,” enthusing that we could use surgery, mind control, and drug and hormone manipulations to fine tune humans for specific tasks. Brave New World was a promise not a threat.
Cherwell fed Churchill – who described Indians as baboos and blackamoors – his line being that there were not enough ships and not enough food. So while millions starved in Bengal white bread was restored to Britain and wheat from Australia sailed past India to end up in storage in Europe – and reaped the UK a handsome profit after the war. Churchill even refused Japanese, Australian, Canadian and South African offers of food aid for Bengal, although in 1941 the Allies had provided the Axis with humanitarian assistance for the hungry Greeks. The only question Madhusree Mukerjee leaves us with is whether Churchill was an ignorant racist or a war criminal.
