Just
like the Jews extracted reparation payments from Germany for their
Holocaust, India too should demand and collect reparation payments from
Great Britain for their Holocaust of 1943-44 in which 4 million Indians
perished.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Faizur Rahman <a.faizur.rahman@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 11:34 AM
Subject: [The Moderates] Remembering India's Forgotten Holocaust
To: The Moderates <the-moderates@googlegroups.
From: Faizur Rahman <a.faizur.rahman@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 11:34 AM
Subject: [The Moderates] Remembering India's Forgotten Holocaust
To: The Moderates <the-moderates@googlegroups.
Remembering India’s Forgotten Holocaust
British policies killed nearly 4 million Indians in the 1943-44 Bengal Famine
June 13, 2014, Issue 25 Volume
Scorched earth By
1943, hordes of starving people were flooding into Calcutta and a huge
number of them died on the city streets. Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia
Commons
The
Bengal Famine of 1943-44 must rank as the greatest disaster in the
subcontinent in the 20th century. Nearly 4 million Indians died because
of an artificial famine created by the British government, and yet it
gets little more than a passing mention in Indian history books.
What
is remarkable about the scale of the disaster is its time span. World
War II was at its peak and the Germans were rampaging across Europe,
targeting Jews, Slavs and the Roma for extermination. It took Adolf
Hitler and his Nazi cohorts 12 years to round up and murder 6 million
Jews, but their Teutonic cousins, the British, managed to kill almost 4
million Indians in just over a year, with Prime Minister Winston
Churchill cheering from the sidelines.
Australian
biochemist Dr Gideon Polya has called the Bengal Famine a “manmade
holocaust” because Churchill’s policies were directly responsible for
the disaster. Bengal had a bountiful harvest in 1942, but the British
started diverting vast quantities of food grain from India to Britain,
contributing to a massive food shortage in the areas comprising
present-day West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Bangladesh.
Author
Madhusree Mukerjee tracked down some of the survivors and paints a
chilling picture of the effects of hunger and deprivation. In
Churchill’s Secret War, she writes: “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
Bhaumik, the first to get a PhD from the IITs and whose invention of
excimer surgery enabled Lasik eye surgery, has the famine etched in his
memory. His grandmother starved to death because she used to give him a
portion of her food.
By
1943 hordes of starving people were flooding into Calcutta, most dying
on the streets. The sight of well-fed white British soldiers amidst this
apocalyptic landscape was “the final judgement on British rule in
India”, said the Anglophile Jawaharlal Nehru.
Churchill
could easily have prevented the famine. Even a few shipments of food
grain would have helped, but the British prime minister adamantly turned
down appeals from two successive Viceroys, his own Secretary of State
for India and even the President of the US .
Subhas
Chandra Bose, who was then fighting on the side of the Axis forces,
offered to send rice from Myanmar, but the British censors did not even
allow his offer to be reported.
Churchill
was totally remorseless in diverting food to the British troops and
Greek civilians. To him, “the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis
(was) less serious than sturdy Greeks”, a sentiment with which Secretary
of State for India and Burma, Leopold Amery, concurred.
Amery
was an arch-colonialist and yet he denounced Churchill’s “Hitler-like
attitude”. Urgently beseeched by Amery and the then Viceroy Archibald
Wavell to release food stocks for India, Churchill responded with a
telegram asking why Gandhi hadn’t died yet.
Wavell
informed London that the famine “was one of the greatest disasters that
has befallen any people under British rule”. He said when Holland needs
food, “ships will of course be available, quite a different answer to
the one we get whenever we ask for ships to bring food to India”.
Churchill’s
excuse — currently being peddled by his family and supporters — was
Britain could not spare the ships to transport emergency supplies, but
Mukerjee has unearthed documents that challenge his claim. She cites
official records that reveal ships carrying grain from Australia
bypassed India on their way to the Mediterranean.
Churchill’s
hostility toward Indians has long been documented. 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 a
beastly religion.” On another occasion, he insisted they were “the
beastliest people in the world next to the Germans”.
According
to Mukerjee, “Churchill’s attitude toward India was quite extreme, and
he hated Indians, mainly because he knew India couldn’t be held for very
long.” She writes in The Huffington Post, “Churchill regarded
wheat as too precious a food to expend on non-whites, let alone on
recalcitrant subjects who were demanding independence from the British
Empire. He preferred to stockpile the grain to feed Europeans after the
war was over.”
In
October 1943, at the peak of the famine, Churchill said at a lavish
banquet to mark Wavell’s appointment: “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… 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.”
Churchill was not only a racist but also a liar.
India-hater Winston Churchill blamed Indians for the famine
Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons
A history of holocaustsTo
be sure, Churchill’s policy towards famine-stricken Bengal wasn’t any
different from earlier British conduct in India. In Late Victorian
Holocausts, Mike Davis points out that here were 31 serious famines in
120 years of British rule compared with 17 in the 2,000 years before
British rule.
In
his book, Davis tells the story of the famines that killed up to 29
million Indians. These people were, he says, murdered by British State
policy. In 1876, when drought destituted the farmers of the Deccan
plateau, there was a net surplus of rice and wheat in India. But the
Viceroy, Robert Bulwer-Lytton, insisted that nothing should prevent
their export to England.
In
1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported
record quantities of grain. As the peasants began to starve, government
officials were ordered “to discourage relief works in every possible
way”. The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from
which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. Within
these labour camps, the workers were given less food than the Jewish
inmates of Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp of World War II.
Even
as millions died, Lytton ignored all efforts to alleviate the suffering
of millions of peasants in the Madras region and concentrated on
preparing for Queen Victoria’s investiture as Empress of India. The
highlight of the celebrations was a week-long feast at which 68,000
dignitaries heard her promise the nation “happiness, prosperity and
welfare”.
In 1901, The Lancet
estimated that at least 19 million Indians had died in western India
during the famine of the 1890s. The death toll was so high because the
British refused to implement famine relief. Davis says life expectancy
in India fell by 20 percent between 1872 and 1921.
So it’s hardly surprising that Hitler’s favourite film was The Lives of a Bengal Lancer,
which showed a handful of Britons holding a continent in thrall. The
Nazi leader told the then British Foreign Secretary Edward Wood (Earl of
Halifax) that it was one of his favorite films because “that was how a
superior race must behave and the film was compulsory viewing for the SS
(Schutz-Staffel, the Nazi ‘protection squadron’)”.
Crime and consequencesWhile
Britain has offered apologies to other nations, such as Kenya for the
Mau Mau massacre, India continues to have such genocides swept under the
carpet. Other nationalities have set a good example for us. Israel, for
instance, cannot forget the Holocaust; neither will it let others,
least of all the Germans. Germany continues to dole out hundreds of
millions of dollars in cash and arms aid to Israel.
Armenia
cannot forget the Great Crime — the systematic massacre of 1.8 million
Armenians by the Turks during World War I. The Poles cannot forget
Joseph Stalin’s Katyn massacre.
The
Chinese want a clear apology and reparations from the Japanese for at
least 40,000 killed and raped in Nanking during World War II. And then
there is the bizarre case of the Ukrainians, who like to call a famine
caused by Stalin’s economic policies as genocide, which it clearly was
not. They even have a word for it: Holodomor.
And
yet India alone refuses to ask for reparations, let alone an apology.
Could it be because the British were the last in a long list of
invaders, so why bother with an England suffering from post-imperial
depression? Or is it because India’s English-speaking elites feel
beholden to the British? Or are we simply a nation condemned to
repeating our historical mistakes? Perhaps we forgive too easily.
But
forgiveness is different from forgetting, which is what Indians are
guilty of. It is an insult to the memory of millions of Indians whose
lives were snuffed out in artificial famines.
British
attitudes towards Indians have to seen in the backdrop of India’s
contribution to the Allied war campaign. By 1943, more than 2.5 million
Indian soldiers were fighting alongside the Allies in Europe, Africa and
Southeast Asia. Vast quantities of arms, ammunition and raw materials
sourced from across the country were shipped to Europe at no cost to
Britain.
Britain’s
debt to India is too great to be ignored by either nation. According to
Cambridge University historians Tim Harper and Christopher Bayly, “It
was Indian soldiers, civilian labourers and businessmen who made
possible the victory of 1945. Their price was the rapid independence of
India.”
There
is not enough wealth in all of Europe to compensate India for 250 years
of colonial loot. Forget the money, do the British at least have the
grace to offer an apology? Or will they, like Churchill, continue to
delude themselves that English rule was India’s “Golden Age”?
----- ------ ----- ----- -----
.
.
