How the Brits got away with the Bengal Butchery of 1943

Kolkata: According to stable estimates, around 3 million people perished due to the Bengal Famine between 1943 and 1944. According to the scientists of IIT Gandhinagar, after studying soil data spanning 150 years, there was no natural famine in Bengal during that period. On the 80th anniversary of this tragedy, it is necessary to position the two data points in a logical context.

It is now fairly well established that the Bengal Famine of 1943 was caused entirely by the policies of Winston Churchill, deliberately starving the region on the alibi of the war cause. There is sufficient documentary evidence to confirm that the British PM prioritised the nutrition of the fighting forces as well as recently freed European territories, the Bengalis be damned. It is also widely suggested neither Sir Frederick Burrows, the Governor of Bengal, nor Archibald Wavell, then Commander-in-Chief of India were happy about this situation but did follow orders. Just to set the death toll in context, it represents about half the Holocaust casualty tally, so you can imagine the magnitude.

Amartya Sen has done significant work on this subject, calling this an entitlement failure - a series of factors which were precipitated by British policy - most importantly, there was no serious shortage in food production. Rice exports from Burma were halted due to the Japanese invasion and the 1942 cyclone damaged the autumn crop but even than the 1943 produce was sufficient to feed the population. However, the British decided to divert grain to the war effort and this led to speculative hoarding and thus inflationary pressures that made rice elusive for the poor. A situation that could easily have been salvaged had it not been for the diabolical policies of the empire.

My 85-year-old mother has vivid memories of the crisis and how even relatively affluent households had to survive on boiled rice and that too was a commendable luxury. The black market was rather rampant while dead bodies occupied the streets quite like falling leaves after a norwester. Her anecdotes confirm one more clever ploy of the scheming rulers - Calcutta with its native opinion leaders still had supply chains open while the districts were completely denied and choked. Since 1770, Bengal has been no stranger to destructive famines but the six serious occurrences in the 18th and 19th centuries were caused by serious drought and not wilful carnage.

Rather interestingly, educated Indians have been rather ambivalent on this matter and it is important to understand why. Firstly, it only affected undivided Bengal and as the entire nation was unscathed, the narrative seemed ‘regional’ in the context of ongoing national and global turmoil, with the freedom movement and the precarious war scenarios gaining precedence. Also, the death tolls were naturally underreported and thus the magnitude of the devastation was understood much later. The Congress had other priorities to establish as a new order was emerging and possibly did not want to stir a seemingly regional issue, the sequel to Quit India more important.

But this mindset of denial continued way after independence as India made peace with the empire and instead concentrated on breaking bridges with the brand new foe, Pakistan. It would have been rather inconvenient for Pandit Nehru, a recent graduate from the jailhouse to the boardroom, to bring this up with Attlee or even the ousted Churchill, in the spirit of general whitewashing. Another seemingly minor, but crucial factor, was the death of Rabindranath Tagore in 1941, as he would certainly bring up this matter on the global stage as he did with the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Inarguably, thought-leading Bengalis are partially to blame, since the British supply chains protected their interest and the plight of the poorer ‘them’ selfishly eluded their bandwidth, a predictable pattern in a classist society. Yet another underrated reason for this underplaying would be the events of 1946 and 1947, the tragic partition narratives completely overwhelmed our post-1947 sorrow agendas, as Divide and Rule became a living reality.

Only In 2010, Madhusree Mukherjee’s book on this matter ‘ Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II’ resuscitated overdue interest and a newer spirit of enquiry emerged amongst fresher Indians. In 2023, from the secure confines of a successful nation, this murderous act deserves special scrutiny and it is never too late to hang the deserving, as the timeless Nazi hunting of Simon Wiesenthal and his team has proved over time. For starters, we must consider this to be a national tragedy, just as General Dyer’s shooting was never projected as a Punjabi affair, even though the ethnicity of the dead was clearly skewed. Even though the partition technically affected Punjabis and Bengalis mostly, the discourse is surely alive and throbbing in Bangalore and Indore as well, location no bar.

Perhaps, the starting point is a petition to the Government for setting up a global enquiry commission on the Bengal Famine, evangelised with the same zeal as the Netaji mystery brigade. This must be an intellectual and not an emotional exercise, with hard facts, newly released data and anecdotal evidence combining to confirm the conspiracy narrative. It may be absurd to imagine that the UK would agree to reparations but at least a documented affirmation of such atrocities must appear in the public domain, evoking a suitable apology. In a related context, regarding the repatriation of stolen colonial artefacts, a French minister wisely said that the objective is neither repentance nor denial but the act of recognition - in this case, that would be a major victory.

Some may ask whether such archaic excavation is necessary in this friendly new world order, with a UK-India FTA pretty much on course. I would argue that this is possibly the best time ever, as the hard-earned socio-economic equilibrium between the two nations gives us the licence for inducing introspection. Especially in a genuinely multicultural Britain, when the common folks are rather disgusted with the vestiges of both the monarchy and the empire, one departed and the other intact. An apology would never compensate for the needless loss of so many innocent lives but at least it would be important symbolically, as compensation for deliberate historical wrongs and the revocation of a peerage or two would be a glorious icing.

For many ‘ English First Language’ schoolgoers in India, Winston Spencer Churchill was a textbook GOAT, an imperial superhero effortlessly blending power play and word craft on a formidable foundation of courage and intellect. Much later, we acknowledge that he was also a devilish fiend to our very own people, a culture of proven hatred demonstrated mildly in parliament and devilishly in the 1943-44 serial killings. Current dispositions in Great Britain certainly have moral and ethical accountability for the acts of a sitting PM as denying food was certainly not fair play.

For starters, it would help to give the Bengal Famine a ‘viral’ brand name, along the lines of the Jewish Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide. My choice would be the ‘Bengal Butchery’ and perhaps the BBC would be interested in exposing the perpetrators.