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,” Winston Churchill wrote in his 1950 history of the 20th century’s most lethal conflict. “They were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small Island.”
These are the opening sentences of the Prologue in the latest book by Madhusree Mukerjee, former editor, Scientific American, nuclear physicist, and author of The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders.
Churchill’s claims were hogwash. The Prologue continues: “Britain’s wartime prime minister did not discuss in his six-volume account the 1943 famine in the eastern Indian province of Bengal, which killed 1.5 million people by the official estimate and 3 million by most others.”
That famine, Winston Churchill’s secret holocaust in India, is the centrepiece of this book.
Mukerjee places the famine in the context of British plunder and pauperisation of Bengal for about two centuries; World War II, when they reached their climax; India’s freedom movement; and Churchill’s monstrosities in India.
In a bid to know whether Churchill could have prevented the famine, and whether he deliberately denied famine relief, Mukerjee turns the spotlight on him.
Churchill demonstrated profound disdain for the denizens of India, Britain’s largest colony. This emanated from his obnoxious notions of racial
superiority, an evil which he shared with Hitler. Leopold S Amery, Churchill’s wartime secretary of state for India compared him with Hitler: “I hate Indians; they are a beastly people with a beastly religion”, “the Hindus are a foul race protected by their mere pullulation (rapid breeding) from the doom that is their due”, so went Churchill’s tirade. He even wished that the head of Britain’s bomber command could send some of his surplus bombers to destroy them. To Churchill, Gandhi represented Hindu guile — a malignant, subversive fanatic, a thoroughly evil force, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer posing as a fakir striding half-naked.
Mukerjee traces the Churchill government’s wartime policy of callous indifference and deliberate denial of food relief to the starving millions to Churchill’s racial prejudices.
She argues that India sacrificed at least as much as Britain did in the defence of an empire from which it had long been struggling to break free; and one primary cause of the famine was the extent to which Churchill and his advisers chose to use the resources of India to wage war against Germany and Japan. Amery also saw the famine as a straightforward consequence of the war effort, when Churchill made no sufficient allowance for the sense of Imperial responsibility in India.
Even as millions of people were dying of starvation in Bengal, instead of sending emergency food shipments Churchill used the wheat and ships at his disposal to build stockpiles for feeding postwar Britain and Europe.
If the famine and starvation deaths showed one facet of Churchill’s perfidies, his urge to continue the British ‘stranglehold’ on India revealed another. He explained that Britain’s task in India was to preserve the balance between the several feuding groups, and “thus maintain our own control for our advantage and their salvation”; and continued, “I am not at all attracted by the prospect of one united India, which will show us the door.”
Churchill regarded the Hindu-Muslim feud as the bulwark of British rule in India; and unity among Indians of different faiths as fundamentally injurious to British interests. As circumstances indicated that Britain could not control India for long after the war had ended, even as he continued to govern India with a fierce resolve to crush its freedom movement, his alternative was escalating the Hindu-Muslim feud by partitioning the colony to create Pakistan, which he thought, provided the best opportunity to retain British influence in the South Asian region.
Thus, Churchill’s mismanagement — facilitated by dubious advice from the scientist and eugenicist Lord Cherwell — devastated India and set the stage for the massive bloodletting that accompanied the country’s Independence.
If Churchill remains one of the greatest heroes of the 20th century it is mainly because parts of Churchill’s record have gone woefully unexamined. After examining them Mukerjee shows starkly that Churchill was also one of the greatest villains of the 20th century.
The book is unique for its forthrightness, and stunningly new focus, findings, analytical depth, rigour and verve.
— The author is a sociologist and commentator on public affairs. prk1949@googlemail.com