The Passing of Empire

“It was only too clear that [Churchill] had a complex about India from which he would not and could not be shaken.”

-        William Phillips, personal representative of Franklin D. Roosevelt, serving in India.

Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, by Madhusree Mukerjee

India was starving.  The United Kingdom was building a stockpile of food in the Mediterranean for the Greeks and Yugoslavs it hoped one day to liberate; the food was coming on ships from Australia – bypassing a starving India.  India was, of course, part of the United Kingdom.  Churchill was starving British subjects in favor of Britain’s enemies.

India was starving for the benefit of a war between imperialists and fascists; not really a good bargain for Indians.  In the meantime, leaders in both India and Britain were planning for what came next – a likely partition between Hindu and Muslim, resulting in the creation of Pakistan.  Pakistan – which would then be beholden to Britain for its independence – could then be used as a base for future operations against the Soviet Union.

Governor George Cunningham of the North West Frontier Province exulted at the Muslim League’s triumph in local elections.  “It would not, I think, have been possible had not the ground been prepared by the propaganda which we have been doing almost since the war started, most of it on Islamic lines.”

British authorities saw Muslims and Christians as “natural allies,” as they each had a book – unlike the “idolatrous” Hindus. 

Meanwhile, in Bengal, tens of millions of people were starving.  “Bengal is rapidly approaching starvation,” wrote the governor of Bengal to the viceroy on July 2, 1943.  In the meantime, other regions of India were still exporting grains; the export of rice was only stopped on July 23. 

By mid-1943, the number of ships available to the Allies greatly exceeded the numbers required for Allied operations.  American industry by now was running at full force, and demands for the eventual landing in France were still in the future.  Still, shipping was not made available for grains to India.

Offers to make grain available were made by several British allies – and none were accepted.  Grain was available, but the shipping would not be spared.  All the while, Churchill’s sources of anger toward India were building to one large crescendo.  One source of his anger was the significant and growing debt owed by Britain to India due to India’s support of the war.

Churchill wanted to charge India the equivalent of the debt owed for saving her from Japanese invasion; he was quickly reminded that it was India that defended Britain’s Middle East for the first two years of the war.

None of this would be of help to the starving.  The gruel offered at relief kitchens was reduced to four ounces of rice per day per person:

That came to 400 calories, at the low end of the scale on which, at much the same time, inmates at Buchenwald were being fed.

Constant and extended hunger had a cost in community: husbands leaving wives; fathers throwing babies into wells; mothers throwing children into the river, after which they jumped in as well; parents pitted against children for scraps; everyone in the house killed to avoid starvation; suicides soared.

Bodies everywhere, some dead others dying.  Whether dead or dying, all subject to jackals, dogs, and worms.  For young boys, hope was only to be had if someone took notice and cared; for young girls, there was hope in sex.  One survey found that 90 percent of the 30,000 women serving in the military labor corps in eastern Bengal were suffering from venereal disease.

Newspapers in Calcutta wrote horrifying accounts of the moral degeneracy that the famine had induced.  Mothers had turned into murderers, village belles into whores, fathers into traffickers of daughters.

Conclusion

By the third week of September, the scene was described as “ghastly.”

…whereas natives “hoarded,” which was at least in principle a penal offense, white men “stockpiled” – which was not only legal but recommended.

The natives began to stockpile the bodies along the palace built by the marquess of Wellesley in the eighteenth century.  It was a grand palace, with twenty acres of gardens and twelve white marble busts of Roman emperors.

The wreath of corpses marked the passing of empire.

The Cyclone

Everyone in Midnapore dates the famine from the day of the cyclone, October 16, 1942.

Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, by Madhusree Mukerjee

From the beginning of British rule until the mid-twentieth century, events transpired as one would expect regarding the colony: wealth transferred from colony to the empire; rebellions against foreign rule; suppressions against local protests; closing of the local congress. 

Most important for this story: India went from being reasonably self-sufficient in food and grain to a significant exporter of these, to the benefit of other parts of the Empire.  Life-expectancy was increasing in Britain while decreasing in India.

Inventory in food and grain was minimized from the beginning of the war.  In the face of this, the cyclone; heavy rains and wind, strong enough to lift a man.  The winds went from morning until midnight; the banks of the Rupnarayan River had burst, and the ocean swept in:

Salt water covered the entire landscape.  The cyclone had destroyed virtually every tree and house on the horizon.

Huts collapsed; bodies – human and animal – floated by in the flood-waters; trees uprooted.  Something between ten-thousand and thirty-thousand perished.  Worst of all, the receding waters left a layer of sand that crushed the rice plants; the crop – expected to be harvested that winter – was gone.  A difficulty in any circumstance; the beginning of a famine when years of forced export drained all inventory and stores.

No more cereal was going to be available for upward of a year – until the next crop could be sown in the monsoon of 1943 and harvested at the end of that December.

The government (British, of course) would not allow the release of boats for rescue; cyclone relief would be withheld until the people turned over stolen guns; private charity workers were arrested for attempting to provide aid. 

By January 1943, a food crisis was raging in Bengal.  As the government could pay any price for food, prices immediately escalated – exacerbating even further the misery of the people.  Rice in the country – including Bengal – was extracted for the cities; famine was traded to avoid chaos in the cities.  The extraction was not voluntarily supported. 

Any reserves were either transferred or destroyed – destroyed to keep them out of the hands of insurgents.  Society would break down: gang rape and prostitution both became common – the first, often by police, the second often to just get some food.

Nothing would shake Churchill’s resolve:

“I am glad to learn from the Minister of War Transport that a strict line is being taken in dealing with requests for cereals from the Indian Ocean area.  A concession to one country at once encourages demands from all the others.”

Of course, the others weren’t in the middle of a famine.

“They must learn to look after themselves as we have done.”

By forcibly taking food from India in the first place, and commandeering all Indian registered shipping.

“The grave situation of the U.K. import programme imperils the whole war effort and we cannot afford to send ships merely as a gesture of good will.”

If one defines “good will” as feeding a people whom you have deprived of all possibility to feed themselves….

It didn’t help that Britain was going deep into debt – and one of their larger creditors was…India!  At war’s end, Britain likely wouldn’t have funds sufficient for food for the home island – hence, stockpiling now was a sensible alternative…for the British; Britain was exporting its future economic risk to its colonies. 

The government in India pleaded for imports of grain, but none would be forthcoming for months.  What little shipping that was available all went to war transport or for shipping food from Australia to the Middle East, North Africa, or Europe – bypassing Bengal along the way.  And many of the available ships were being transferred from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.

Conclusion

“There is no reason why all parts of the British Empire should not feel the pinch in the same way as the Mother Country has done.”  So said Churchill.  Of course, the mother country was not facing famine.  The biggest depravation in 1943 was that they had to eat multi-grain bread instead of white.

The situation was soon to turn catastrophic.

When You Say Peace, I Hear the Other Thing

…this episode in Indian history will surely become the Golden Age as time passes, when the British gave them peace and order, and there was justice for the poor, and all men were shielded from outside dangers.  The Golden Age.

-        Winston Churchill

Churchill's Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, by Madhusree Mukerjee

In the seventeenth century – before Britain got her hands on it – Bengal was described by physician François Bernier as “the finest and most fruitful country in the world.”  An embellishment, perhaps, but he found markets brimming with rice, sugar, corn, vegetables, mustard, and sesame; fish and meat were plentiful; vibrant towns and cities were interspersed with lush farmland.

Once the British East India Company got its hands on Bengal, with its estimated annual gain of £1,650,000 per year, it was quickly to become one of the world’s poorest. 

By 1769, Bengal had no gold, silver, or other valuables left.  A group of Armenian merchants – whose trade in the region long preceded that of the British – petitioned the Calcutta Council, complaining that the lack of currency had brought virtually all business to a halt, so that “not only a general bankruptcy is to be feared, but a real famine, in the midst of wealth and plenty.”

Shortly thereafter, it is estimated that about one-third of the people of Bengal – numbering 10 million – perished.  Weather played a role, but the region had dealt with such situations before.  British rule was new:

In the first years of the rule of the British East India Company, the total land tax income was doubled and most of this revenue flowed out of the country. As the famine approached its height in April 1770, the Company announced that the land tax for the following year was to be increased by a further 10 percent.

Yeah, that would help.

The historian William Dalrymple has called Robert Clive [Commander-in-Chief of British India] an "unstable sociopath" due to these harmful policies and actions that resulted in famines and atrocities towards local native Indians and peasants. Changes caused by Clive to the revenue system and existing agricultural practices to maximize profits for the company partially led to the famine of 1770.

Famines were interspersed with contributions of men and wealth in support of the British Empire – Afghanistan, the Middle East, and World War One; rebellions and massacres.

Returning to Mukerjee’s book and the events leading up to and during World War II: in March 1942, the Japanese smashed the Empire’s defenses and occupied Burma.  Rice imports to India’s poor were cut off.  British authorities reacted with a scorched-earth policy: rice was removed from Bengal; transport facilities such as barges were transferred away from the region.  In case of further advances, the enemy was deprived of these resources; the people of Bengal were deprived of these resources in the meantime.

Further, food and grains were transferred out of India in support of other parts of the Empire – primarily the home island, but also in stores for the purpose of feeding the not-yet-defeated-but-as-of-now-still-enemy populations of the Balkans and Italy.  In exchange, India received notes – promises to pay.  Slowly, Britain was becoming a substantial debtor in favor of India.  All the while, necessary food and supplies were leaving the region.

In the war, where was the potential of freedom for the Indian people?  Britain on the one hand, the Japanese on the other.  It was a fight that offered no meaningful gain to the population, only cost.

We are introduced to Frederick Lindemann – better known as Lord Cherwell; born in Germany, he later came to Britain.  He was an important advisor to Churchill during the war – perhaps his pre-eminent advisor; Churchill appointed him as the British government's leading scientific adviser.  For some idea of his character:

He advocated the "area" bombing or "strategic bombing" of German cities and civilian homes during the Second World War by falsely stating data to Winston Churchill from a study on the psychological impact of Germany's Birmingham Blitz and Hull Blitz on the local populations.

Per Mukerjee, Cherwell was so deeply racist that the presence of any black person evoked “physical revulsion.”  When it came to India, his recommendations to Churchill almost always prevailed.

Conclusion

The Bengal famine of 1943 was a major famine of the Bengal province in British India during World War II. An estimated 2.1–3 million, out of a population of 60.3 million, died of starvation, or of malaria and other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions and lack of health care. Millions were impoverished as the crisis overwhelmed large segments of the economy and social fabric. Historians have frequently characterised the famine as "man-made", asserting that wartime colonial policies created and then exacerbated the crisis. A minority view holds that the famine arose from natural causes.

The British Empire led by Churchill, through action and inaction, was the primary driver in this famine.  There were dozens of opportunities to take action to relieve the suffering or to not cause the suffering in the first place, and in virtually every instance Churchill chose to do precisely the opposite.

Mukerjee will provide the details.