VIEWPOINT
Why don’t we talk about the death of three million people in India in 1943,
IN THE MIDDLE of the Second World War in the dying days of Empire at least three million Indians, who were British subjects, died because of starvation or disease linked to malnutrition. It’s one of the largest losses of civilian lives on the Allied side, yet it’s not well known in Britain. There is no memorial, museum or even a plaque anywhere in the world to the victims of the Bengal Famine of 1943. How can three million people disappear from public memory?
For the past year I’ve been gathering f irsthand accounts and scouring archives around the world for testimonies to piece together what happened. More than 80 years after the humanitarian catastrophe, few survivors are left, and there’s a huge urgency in collecting these stories before it’s too late. When I’ve met eye-witnesses, it’s clear, even after all these years, they’ve never forgotten the devastating scenes of emaciated people, of death on the streets of Calcutta, the vultures picking at people who were barely alive.
Much debate has focused on the many complex causes. Life was already hard for millions of rural Bengalis. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, they swept through South East Asia and were perilously close to the Indian border. Once Burma fell, its cheap rice ceased to be imported into Bengal. Wartime inflation was rife, and the price of rice soon became out of reach for many. The so-called colonial denial policy saw surplus rice and boats from villages near the Bengal Delta confiscated to prevent the Japanese advancing further into British India, should they invade.
This strained the already fragile local economy. Rice was hoarded, often for profit, and a cyclone hit one of the main rice-producing districts in Bengal, with crop disease destroying much of the rest. And on top of that hundreds of thousands of British and American soldiers were in Calcutta to f ight on the Asian front. They, along with all the workers who arrived to work in the wartime industries, needed feeding. So rice supplies were put under huge pressure.
But it’s the role of wartime PM Winston Churchill that’s at the heart of the controversy, and whether he could have done more to alleviate the crisis. There are questions over whether his views on Indians – documented particularly by his Secretary of State for India Leo Amery in his personal diary from the time – affected his response to the famine. Discussion centres on whether he and the war cabinet could have released more shipping, in the middle of the war, when they were fighting on many fronts, to send food aid. It’s an
