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Churchill's
genocidal war
A new book has charged that
Winston Churchill, Britain's
premier and war hero, callously allowed millions of Indians to starve
in the 1943 Bengal famine in the name
of the 'war effort'. Jeremy Seabrook considers the issue.
THE Second World War holds
an apparently inexhaustible fascination for the people of Britain,
perhaps because this was the most recent major conflict in which we
were unambiguously on the right side. What could have been more noble
than the fight against Nazism and Fascism? That we stood alone in the
early years of the war, withstood the Blitz and vanquished a macabre
ideology seemed to suggest that justice does sometimes exist on earth.
The enduring appeal of this
heroic moment, and its repeated commemoration - which is not the same
thing as remembering - make a re-examination of some of the received
ideas essential. Madhusree Mukerjee has done just that, by looking at
one, apparently peripheral, event in 1943, the study of which has been
elided in the otherwise exhaustive chronicle of World War Two. Her recently
published book, Churchill's Secret War (Basic Books, 2010), focuses
on the Bengal famine in India, which killed an unknown number of people
in one year, probably well over three million; deaths regarded with
punitive indifference by Churchill and most of his advisers.
Denial
In more than one way, 1943
was a year of denial. For as well as the harrowing story of famine in
Bengal, it was also the time when news
of the extermination policies of the Nazis was reaching the West, with
evidence that could no longer be rejected as unreliable or based on
rumour. There is an unhappy convergence between the fate of the Jews
in Europe and that of the people of Bengal, denied sustenance in the
name of the 'war effort', to which the people of India had committed much in men and
material. While fighting racism on one front, Britain was promoting and abetting
it on another.
At the heart of Mukerjee's
denunciation of British complicity with starvation in Bengal lies Churchill's
well-known distaste for India
and his contempt for Indians. His attachment to empire was matched by
his detachment from the condition of its captive peoples. This has usually
been retrospectively explained away by the fact that he was an old-fashioned
imperialist, that his was essentially a late-Victorian sensibility,
in which detestation of lesser races was part and parcel of its world-view.
It is excused as a blind spot in this child of empire who was also a
superlative war leader.
Churchill surrounded himself
with advisers who shared his views; and much of Mukerjee's book is concerned
with the vain efforts of those somewhat less prejudiced, notably Leopold
Amery, secretary of state for India, who tried ineffectively to break
through Churchill's carapace of self-belief and represent to him, not
only the humanitarian, but also the strategic, importance of mitigating
the catastrophe in Bengal. Among Churchill's most eager advisers was
the physicist, the ubiquitous Frederick Lindeman (later Lord Cherwell),
who agreed with the Prime Minister on India and had, into the bargain, an
aversion to 'dark-skinned foreigners'.
Centre of resistance
Of course, there were obvious
reasons why Bengal, intractable and
turbulent centre of resistance to British rule, should have provided
such an irritant to Churchill. As early as 1859, Bengal
had resisted the imposition of compulsory indigo-planting, while at
the turn of the century, Bengali revolutionaries bombed and assassinated
British officials. The agitation for independence had come disproportionately
from Bengal, and when Curzon tried to divide the unwieldy province in
1905, six years later, the policy had to be reversed; one consequence
of which was the transfer of the capital of India
to Delhi. Subhas Chandra Bose
had fled to Berlin in 1941 and courted Hitler's support for his Indian
National Army, and when the Japanese occupied Burma, the British feared
that an invasion by Japan, supported by the INA, would lead to a general
uprising in India.
Churchill argued that Britain's
role was 'to preserve the balance between these great masses and thus
maintain our own control for our advantage and their salvation'. He
was 'not at all attracted by the prospect of one united India
which will show us the door', and remained passionately opposed to any
form of self-government in India,
including dominion status.
Ruralisation
Nineteenth-century famines
in India had been
exacerbated by India's
export of grain - some ten million tons annually since 1900. By the
mid-century, India's
industry had been destroyed, and the country had undergone an intensive
ruralisation, as its wealth drained out of Bengal. The life expectancy of Indians remained at about
24 from 1870 until the 1920s.
Churchill's rejection of representations
on behalf of Bengalis was exacerbated by his determination to build
up foodstocks in Britain
during the war, partly as an insurance against foreseeable postwar shortages.
This made him unwilling to divert any shipping towards famine relief,
even when British reserves had already reached record levels. Linlithgow,
Viceroy of India, made frequent requests for grain to Leopold Amery,
but Churchill was adamant. He and his advisers simply denied reports
they received from Bengal, blaming
now 'hoarders', now the Bengali babus, but always the supreme necessity
for the war effort. Churchill was also enraged that India, which had
always paid excessive tribute to Britain, now became a creditor as the
cost of providing manpower and commodities to the Middle East and North
Africa reached œ1 million a day, against a promise of future payment.
When the Quit India movement began in 1942, the leaders of Congress
were jailed, and by May 1943, 105 battalions of British troops were
stationed in India, as much to maintain 'internal
security' as to resist a Japanese invasion. Their maintenance was paid
for by Indians.
Mukerjee draws upon the testimony
of famine survivors to evoke conditions in Bengal: the results of the
'scorched earth' policy in coastal Bengal to deny Japanese invaders
food or transport, the deserted villages with their ruined huts, the
starvelings who besieged Calcutta in search of food, and the forcible
removal of beggars from the streets, since Calcutta was the place where
British soldiers went for rest and recreation.
Churchill's detestation of
Gandhi is well known. He also had a greater regard for Jinnah than for
Nehru, as he probably saw in Jinnah's demand for a separate state for
the Muslims an opening to deflect Congress' demand for an independent
India.
In recent years, it has emerged that he carried on an extensive correspondence,
including some secret correspondence, with Jinnah. His tenacious, indeed
obsessive, personality is generally credited with wartime success, but
his implacability towards the people of India - and 47% of Bengalis
were poorly nourished in a survey as early as 1933 - created a fear
in Lord Wavell, Viceroy from October 1943, that the peace, order and
high condition of wartime wellbeing for a final thrust against Japan
were being undermined. On Wavell's appointment, Churchill presided at
a banquet where he said, 'When we look back over the course of years
we see one part of the world's surface where there has been no war for
three generations.Famines have passed away - until the horrors of war
and the dislocations of war have given us a taste of them again - and
pestilence has gone.' He said that should the time come when Britain
sets aside its responsibilities, '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.'
A capacity for self-delusion
is perhaps the most common affliction of the powerful; and in his monumental
Second World War, in 1953, he wrote, 'No great portion of the world
population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils
of the World War as were the peoples of Hindustan.
They were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small
island.'
No wonder the famine which
preceded the end of British rule in India and which echoed the 1769-70
famine which had initiated it, was reduced in Churchill's account to
an insignificant episode in the epic war against Nazism; since it exemplified
the very dogmas of racial supremacy against which the war was nominally
fought. Churchill's celebrated declaration, that he had not become the
King's Chief Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British
Empire, did not prevent him from being an instrument in
the furtherance of the very process he so bitterly opposed.
Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance
journalist based in the UK.
*Third World Resurgence
No. 242/243, October-November 2010, pp 66-67
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