My Anglo-Indian schooling conditioned me to be an Anglophile. Amongst the long list of Britishers I admired was Winston Churchill. So when I read that a BBC 2002 poll on the 100 Greatest Britons of the last century, the British people chose Churchill as the greatest. I decided to learn more about Churchill. Its painful to see your hero fall. I was dismayed to discover not a hero but a witty, evil, inhuman creature.
While Hitler and his Nazi cohorts took 12 years to round up and murder 6 million Jews on the basis of an absurd racist ideology, Racist Churchill took less than a year to gleefully kill between 4 to 5 million Indians.
Churchill exported the entire bountiful harvest to Europe and deliberately starved Eastern India. He adamantly turned down appeals from two successive Viceroys, his own Secretary of State for India and even the President of America to stop the holocaust.
Suffering from selective amnesia, slick historians and politicians of a victorious Britain glorified their own achievements and had Churchill duly glamourised and immortalised.
Australian biochemist Dr Gideon Polya has called the Bengal Famine of 1943 - 44 a “manmade holocaust”, the greatest disaster in the Indian subcontinent in the 20th century. Over 4 million Indians died because of an artificial famine engineered by Churchill's deliberate and direct policies".
Areas comprising present-day West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Bangladesh had a bountiful harvest in 1942, but the British diverted vast quantities of food grain from India to Britain, contributing to a massive food shortage in these very areas.
In her well researched book Churchill’s Secret War author Madhusree Mukerjee tracked down some of the survivors and paints a chilling picture of the effects of hunger and deprivation.
“Parents dumped their starving children into rivers and wells. Many took their lives by throwing themselves in front of trains. Starving people begged for the starchy water in which rice had been boiled. Children ate leaves and vines, yam stems and grass. People were too weak even to cremate their loved ones.”
“No one had the strength to perform rites,” a survivor tells Mukerjee. “Dogs and jackals feasted on piles of dead bodies in Bengal’s villages.”
The ones who got away were men who migrated to Calcutta for jobs and women who turned to prostitution to feed their families. “Mothers had turned into murderers, village belles into whores, fathers into traffickers of daughters,” writes Mukerjee.
Mani Lal Bhaumik, the first person to get a PhD from the prestigious IITs and whose invention of excimer surgery enabled Lasik eye surgery, has the famine burnt into his memory. His grandmother starved to death because she used to give him a portion of her food.
Even the diehard Anglophile Jawaharlal Nehru, felt compelled to condemn the British action. after he received the report Bengal Lamenting prepared by that great lady Ms. Freda Bedi
Legendary Indian freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose, offered to send rice from Myanmar, but the British not only rejected the offer but censored news of Bose's offer.
Secretary of State for India and Burma, Leopold Amery , denounced Churchill’s “Hitler-like attitude”.
When the scale of the emerging holocaust became known Amery and the then Viceroy Archibald Wavell beseeched Churchill to release food stocks for India, Churchill did nothing except respond with a telegram asking. 'Why Gandhi hadn’t died as yet?.
Churchill’s excuse, currently being peddled by his family and supporters, was Britain could not spare the ships to transport emergency supplies. However Mukerjee has unearthed documents that challenge this lie.
She cites official records that reveal many ships carrying grain from Australia bypassed India on their way to the Mediterranean. Churchill could have saved millions of Indian lives but he chose not to.
Churchill was a racist who hated Indians for every conceivable reason and mostly because Indians expressed their desire to be free. At a War Cabinet meeting, he blamed the Indians themselves for the famine, saying they “breed like rabbits”. His attitude toward Indians may be summed up in his words to Amery: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with beastly religions.”
The author Mike Davis in his award winning book Late Victorian Holocausts points out that that there were 31 serious famines in 120 years of British rule compared with 17 in the 2,000 years before British rule.
15 Million Indians died because of Colonial Genocide.
Some fools, arrogant, vocal and ignorant about real history try to convince others that British rule was a glorious period in Indian history.
Nothing could be further from the truth. From the time the British began its conquest of India, India's share went from 25% of global GDP in 1750 to 1.8% in 1947 (when the British left India).
Inexplicably these enslaved Indian minds still pine for their former British masters.
Are we free?
We can consider ourselves free only when we break the shackles placed on our culture, mind and economy by colonialism, Marxism, religious fundamentalism and pseudo secularism. Only when we contribute to a greater India and a better humanity, can we claim to be free.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Further reading :
* Winston Churchill has as much blood on his hands as the worst genocidal dictators - (Independent UK
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Ranga Bedi responded,
"Just to let you know my mother,Freda Bedi, was assigned by Pt.Nehru as official representative of the Congress party to report on the Bengal famine.She travelled to the affected districts of Bengal and submitted her report titled Bengal Lamenting a copy of which is in the National Library,Alipore Calcutta."
I received the following feedback from various readers.
Krishan K Punchhi responded,
"In 1943 I was 8 yrs old and we lived in Amritsar. We had many many 'Bhooka Bengalis' roaming all over and begging for food. My parents told me there was a big famine in Bengal and they helped them as much as they could. It was much later that I learnt that it was a man-made famine."
Bhim Makhija responded,
"I can vouch for the soul stirring description of the Bengal famine as an eye witness as I was living in Calcutta from 1943 to 1945. As an apprentice in a shipyard we got weekly ration of subsidised rice which we 'd often use to prepare 'Kichddi'…