Bengal Famine: When Humanity Starved

It was time when India was under the colonial rule of British empire and it was the insanity of Indian soldiers again got involved in WW2 depicting the history of never learning from the past after getting denial in WW1.This was the period when nearly whole world was going through the disastrous impact of Second World War (1939-1945) and by 1943 the war had already consumed many nations claiming the lives of large number of soldiers and civilians approximately millions. Media of the time rightly called it “History’s biggest genocide”.

In the same period a significantly large and yet silent theatre of death was operating in Bengal right under the nose of British rule. It was the outcome of callousness of an Empire and would rank as one of the worst disasters of our times. It took Hitler a decade starting from 1930s to kill 6 million Jews, gypsies and other communities under ‘extermination list’ of Nazis but it took only one year 1943 for British policies to accomplish the mass murder of 4 million Indians by condemning them to a slow death from hunger, disease and sometimes by their own hand as they were driven to desperation.

Author Madhushree Mukherjee writes in her book, Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India (2011): “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 top cremate their loved ones.”

“Bengal famine was a result of food scarcity caused by large-scale exports of food from India for use in the war theatres and consumption in Britain. India exported more than 70,000 tonnes of rice between January and July 1943, even as the famine set in. This would have kept nearly 400,000 people alive for a full year. Churchill turned down fervent pleas to export food to India citing a shortage of ships - this when shiploads of Australian wheat, for example, would pass by India to be stored for future consumption in Europe. As imports dropped, prices shot up and hoarders made a killing. Mr Churchill also pushed a scorched earth policy - which went by the sinister name of Denial Policy - in coastal Bengal where the colonisers feared the Japanese would land. So authorities removed boats (the lifeline of the region) and the police destroyed and seized rice stocks. During the 1873-’74 famine, the Bengal lieutenant governor, Richard Temple, saved many lives by importing and distributing food. But the British government criticised him and dropped his policies during the drought of 1943, leading to countless fatalities. "I hate Indians.”

 They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits." -Winston Churchill

References

A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, SP Singh, Advantage India

Dr. S.D. Choudhury , Bengal Famine of 1943: Misfortune or Imperial Schema

Tirthankar Roy, Were Indian Famines ‘Natural’ Or ‘Manmade’?

Madhusree Mukerjee, Bengal Famine of 1943: An Appraisal of the Famine Inquiry Commission