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Churchill and the Genocide Myth: Last Word on the Bengal Famine
- By ZAREER MASANI
- | January 27, 2021
- Category: Churchill and Asia Truths and Heresies
“Churchill and the Genocide Myth,” published in The Critic of December 2020, is reprinted here by kind permission of the author. Dr. Masani’s is the first essay on the Bengal Famine we have published in “Truths and Heresies” since 2015. Its thoroughness suggests that nothing further will be required.
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A favourite trope of the current black lives madness and its apologists has been the alleged infamy of Britain’s most cherished hero, Winston Churchill, charged with everything from mere racism to actual genocide. The worst accusation is that of deliberately starving four million Bengalis to death in the famine of 1943.
The famine took place at the height of the Second World War, with the Japanese already occupying Burma and invading the British Indian province of Bengal, bombing its capital, Calcutta, and patrolling its coast with submarines.
The famine raged for about six months, from the summer of 1943 until the end of that year, and estimates of its victims range from half a million upwards, depending on whether one includes its indirect and long-term effects. Most famine experts agree that famines can be caused by both nature and human agency, but never by any single individual. So how has a 67-year-old British prime minister in poor health, 5000 miles away, fighting near-annihilation in a world war, come to be charged with causing such a cataclysmic disaster?
The attempt to lay this at Churchill’s door stems from a sensationalist book by a Bengali-American journalist called Madhusree Mukerjee. As its title, Churchill’s Secret War, indicates, it was a largely conspiracist attempt to pin responsibility on a distant Churchill for undoubted mistakes on the ground in Bengal.
The actual evidence shows that Churchill believed, based on information he was getting, that there was no food shortage in Bengal, but a demand problem caused by local mismanagement of the distribution system. Ironically, his view found unexpected support in a 2010 exchange between Mukerjee and the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, the world’s foremost expert on famine in India.
Too little information, inadequately applied
Commenting in The New York Times, Sen said Mukerjee “seems satisfied with little information” and that her data came from only two rice research stations, and those in only two out of 27 districts in Bengal. “The analysis I made,” countered Sen, “using data from all districts…indicated that food availability in 1943 (the famine year) was significantly higher than in 1941 (when there was no famine). There was indeed a substantial shortfall compared with demand, hugely enhanced in a war economy…but that is quite different from a shortfall of supply compared with supply in previous years…. Mukerjee seems to miss this crucial distinction, and in her single-minded…attempt to nail down Churchill, she ends up absolving British imperial policy of confusion and callousness.”
The “confusion and callousness” to which Sen alludes had nothing to do with Churchill and was largely the result of wartime supply constraints, with most of Bengal’s boats commandeered or disabled, and uneasy relations between the elected, Muslim-led, coalition government of Bengal and its largely Hindu grain merchants, notorious for hoarding and speculation.
Provincial autonomy, with democratically-elected ministries, was the result of the British-sponsored 1935 constitution, designed to give India dominion status, like Canada and Australia, once its princes and politicians agreed on a federal central government.
Churchill’s role and responsibility
Churchill, no friend to Indian independence or dominion status, had considered the constitution premature, and had fought its adoption tooth and nail in the House of Commons in the 1930s, dooming himself to the back benches for a decade. By the 1940s, nonetheless, he regarded the food situation in Bengal as primarily a matter for its elected ministry rather than Whitehall. Within the war cabinet itself, Churchill’s role was one of broad oversight rather than detailed management. So the idea that he had much influence on actual relief aid to Bengal is far-fetched, especially at the height of the war.
Nineteen forty-three began as a year of normal harvest, leaving the Bengal ministry sanguine about food supplies and the viceroy’s government in Delhi reluctant to intervene with its reserve powers. Once the Viceroy did intervene, the famine was rapidly brought under control and petered out within months. And it was Churchill who replaced the lethargic Lord Linlithgow as viceroy with the efficient and politically sensitive Field Marshal Archibald Wavell, brought in partly to address the famine.
Even Mukerjee never blames Churchill for actually causing the Bengal famine, but for compounding it by refusing to allow shipments of grain from Australia and Canada, bound for Europe, to be diverted there. Mukerjee’s camp-followers have taken this accusation further with fantastical claims that Bengal was being forced to export food to Ceylon, while Australian food shipments were forced to sail past Calcutta without stopping, en route to Europe.
Alleviate the famine, sustain the war
The fact is that Bengal only ever sent one food shipment to Ceylon that year, and it was an equal exchange of grain for rice. As for Australian food shipments being diverted from Calcutta, one has only to look at a map to see what a nonsense it would have been for Australian ships bound for Europe to come anywhere near the Bay of Bengal and run the gauntlet of Japanese submarines.
The true facts about food shipments to Bengal, amply recorded in the British war cabinet and government of India archives, are that more than a million tons of grain arrived in Bengal between August 1943, when the war cabinet first realised the severity of the famine, and the end of 1944, when the famine had petered out.
This was food aid specifically sent to Bengal, much of it on Australian ships, despite strict food rationing in England and severe food shortages in newly-liberated southern Italy and Greece. As detailed in Andrew Roberts’s brilliant biography, far from seeking to starve India, Churchill and his cabinet sought every possible way to alleviate the suffering without undermining the war effort.
The truth about food shipments
On 4 August 1943, when Churchill’s war cabinet first realised the enormity of the famine, it agreed that 150,000 tons of Iraqi barley and Australian wheat should be sent to Bengal, with Churchill himself insisting on 24 September that “something must be done.” Though emphatic “that Indians are not the only people who are starving in this war,” he agreed to send a further 250,000 tons, to be shipped over the next four months.
On 7 October, Churchill told the war cabinet that one of the new viceroy’s first duties was to see to it “that famine and food difficulties were dealt with.” He wrote to Wavell the next day: “Every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with local shortages.” Churchill refused a Canadian offer of 100,000 tons of food aid for Bengal because it would have taken two months to arrive, but the same war cabinet meeting resolved to seek Australian supplies instead.
By January 1944, Bengal had received a total of 130,000 tons of barley from Iraq, 80,000 tons of wheat from Australia and 10,000 from Canada, followed by a further 100,000 from Australia. Then, on 14 February 1944, Churchill called an emergency meeting of the war cabinet to see if more food aid could be sent to Bengal without wrecking Allied plans for the coming Normandy landings. “I will certainly help you all I can, but you must not ask the impossible,” Churchill telegraphed Wavell before the cabinet met. The next day, he informed Wavell: “We have given a great deal of thought to your difficulties, but we simply cannot find the shipping.”
Emergency measures
Allied shipping had by now been stretched to breaking point by new fronts in Italy and by the need to send supplies to starving Russia. But Secretary of State for India Leopold Amery assured Wavell that the prime minister “was not unsympathetic”.
Meanwhile, the cabinet instructed the government of India to impose rationing across the whole subcontinent, raise taxes and impose food price controls. The cabinet expressed a suspicion that the shortages were “partly political in character, caused by Marwari (Hindu) supporters of Congress in an effort to embarrass the existing Muslim Government of Bengal.”
On 24 April 1944, the cabinet minutes recorded: “The prime minister said that it was clear that His Majesty’s Government could only provide further relief for the Indian situation at the cost of incurring grave difficulties in other directions. At the same time, his sympathy was great for the sufferings of the people of India.”
These were not empty words. A few days later, Churchill asked President Roosevelt for shipping to supply Bengal, saying he was “seriously concerned” about the famine, that Wavell needed a million extra tons of grain that was available in Australia, but without ships to transport it. The request was refused by the U.S. administration on the grounds that it needed all its shipping to supply the Pacific theatre and the impending D-Day landings.
“To halt the Bengal famine in its tracks”
India’s foremost economic historian, Professor Tirthankar Roy, at the London School of Economics, grew up in post-famine Calcutta. His own verdict is remarkably balanced:
The cabinet believed what Calcutta and Delhi told it: that there was no shortage of food in Bengal. The cabinet took decisions in the knowledge that the Axis powers were sinking one ship every day and had sunk around a million tons of shipping in 1942. The regions where rice might be available were the most dangerous waters to enter. Army rations were already reduced; any further cuts could risk a mutiny.
Despite such obstacles, by the end of 1944 Wavell’s much-requested one million additional tons had been secured from Australia and the allied South East Asia Command, and shipped to Bengal.
To Churchill must go the credit for appointing in October 1943 the man arguably most responsible for these successes. British India’s most able and conscientious viceroy, Field Marshal Wavell, with his long and distinguished record of service in India, his intimate knowledge of its peoples and languages and his experience of large-scale military logistics, was just the person to halt the Bengal famine in its tracks, drafting in the army to get food supplies moving quickly from surplus to deficit areas.
Churchill’s view of Indians
Much of Mukerjee’s case against Churchill rests not on his actions but on his alleged racist comments about Indians, and Bengalis in particular. Most of these have been taken out of context. Churchill was certainly no friend to Indian nationalist leaders, most of whom he regarded as moralising humbugs. He was an unashamed imperialist, like many of his generation, and committed to maintaining India’s unity within the British Empire. He had a strongly-held conviction that too sudden and rapid a move to democracy and independence would tear the subcontinent apart on sectarian lines—a fear that events would justify.
On the other hand, Churchill repeatedly voiced his admiration for the gallantry of Indian troops, noting in his war memoirs:
The unsurpassed bravery of Indian soldiers and officers, both Moslem and Hindu, shine for ever in the annals of war. Upwards of two and a half million Indians volunteered to serve in the forces…. The response of the Indian peoples, no less than the conduct of their soldiers, makes a glorious final page in the story of our Indian Empire.
Despite his fears about Indian independence, Churchill’s views noticeably mellowed over the years. On 5 February 1942, Churchill proposed in cabinet to visit India to make its Congress leaders an offer of postwar independence, in return for their supporting the war effort. But instead the war cabinet sent its senior Labour minister, Sir Stafford Cripps, known for his friendship with Congress leaders. When the Cripps mission failed to meet their demand for immediate independence, Congress launched the Quit India Movement of civil disobedience against the Raj and resolved to offer only passive resistance to the Japanese invasion.
The Indian separatists and Leo Amery
When informed of Cripps’s rebuff in September 1942, an apoplectic Churchill exclaimed to Amery: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” He was referring to Hinduism, rather than Islam, given loyal support for the war effort from the Muslim League. Churchill saw Gandhi’s decision to launch the Quit India Movement in the middle of the war as a stab in the back when Britain most needed and deserved loyal support.
Churchill also (like many Indian liberals and socialists) saw Gandhi’s political fasts as a form of emotional blackmail. And he was appalled, as were many Congress Party people, by extreme nationalists such as the Bengali leader Subhas Chandra Bose joining hands with Hitler and the Japanese, a fact not calculated to endear Bengalis in general to Churchill.
The Prime Minister’s abusive comments about Gandhi, Indians and Bengalis need to be seen in that context. They also need to be seen in the context of his penchant for making outrageous comments that he didn’t really mean in order to shock or tease. The long-suffering butt of many such remarks was Leopold Amery, whom Churchill had teased since boyhood. He liked to interrupt Amery’s long perorations on India with racist jokes designed to shock him and cut him short.
Amery was not amused and once responded by likening Churchill’s language to Hitler’s. None of this was meant to be taken very seriously, but Amery made a habit of writing it all down rather solemnly in his diaries. When these were published in 1997, they proved a bonanza for Mukerjee and others of her ilk, who seized on Churchill’s every racist word as evidence of yet darker deeds.
“A great shining India”
In July 1944, over lunch with the Indian statesman Sir Ramaswamy Mudaliar, a member of the war cabinet, Churchill was heard assuring him that “the old notion that the Indian was in any way inferior to the white man must disappear.” He was quoted as saying: “We must all be pals together. I want to see a great shining India, of which we can be as proud as we are of a great Canada or a great Australia.” **
Referring to India’s growing population, Churchill also remarked: “It was only thanks to the beneficence and wisdom of British rule in India, free from any hint of war for a longer period than almost any other country in the world, that India had been able to increase and multiply to this astonishing extent.”
On another occasion, he proudly told the Spanish ambassador to London, “Since the English occupation of India the native population has increased by 200 million,” and he contrasted this with the extinction of American Indians, a comparison he was fond of making on his trips to the U.S. Whatever the merits of India’s population explosion under stable British rule, these were hardly the sentiments of someone willing to commit genocide by starving the Indian people.
** Duff Hart-Davis, ed., King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War: the Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006), 173.
The author
Zareer Masani has a doctorate in history from Oxford and is a historian and broadcaster. He is the author of Indira Gandhi: A Biography and Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist. His personal memoir, And All is Said, is an intimate portrait of his parents, the charismatic politician Minoo Masani and his gifted wife Shakuntala.
Further reading
Bengal Famine Commission Conclusions, 1944.
Tirthankar Roy: “Inglorious Empire: Some of the Truth, Part of the Time,” 2020
Andrew Roberts: “Stop this Trashing of our Monuments—and of our Past,” 2020
Abhijit Sarkar: “The Effects of Race and Caste on Relief in the Bengal Famine, 1943-44, “2020
Richard M. Langworth: “The Truth about Churchill’s Racist Epithets,” 2020
Bradley Tolppanen, “Great Contemporaries: Leopold Amery,” 2019
Dave Turrell, “The Churchill Documents Vol. 19: Fateful Questions, 1943-44,” 2018
Arthur Herman: “Absent Churchill, Bengal’s Famine Would Have Been Worse,” 2017
Richard M. Langworth: “Frederick Lindemann: Churchill’s Eminence Grise?” 2017
The Churchill Project: “Did Churchill Exacerbate the Bengal Famine?” 2015
While I’m sure you imagined that starting your article with “A favourite trope of the current black lives madness and its apologists” sounded witty, what it does instead is diminish the impact of the article. Serious academics don’t start with those kind of childish comments and pretty much everything presented thereafter is degraded by the bad will engendered by that opening sentece.
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Dr. Masani replies: Those who understand the uses of satire might have the wit and intelligence to read on and not judge my essay from one sentence.
I read somewhere that the comment Churchill made was as follows. “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” Please enlighten us, if this was the case and the context of the same.
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Thank-you for asking. The first two sentences are correctly quoted. The third sentence is manufactured in an attempt to connect the first two sentences to the famine. The first two were stated to Leo Amery on 9 September 1942, a year BEFORE the famine. The context is in my book, Churchill by Himself, p. 164: “Churchill was reacting to a declaration by the Indian Congress Party that only passive resistance should be offered to any Japanese invaders.William F. Buckley, Jr. said of this remark: ‘I don’t doubt that the famous gleam came to his eyes when he said this, with mischievous glee—an offense, in modern convention, of genocidal magnitude.'” The line is often quoted to suggest WSC’s racism, which is denied by his friendships with such Indians as Birla and Nehru, and defenses of human rights among native populations from 1899 to 1954. A year later, Amery reported Churchill saying something about “breeding like rabbits,” but Churchill took delight in outraging Amery and this should be considered. See “Prime Source: Leo Amery” in “Hearsay Doesn’t Count: The Truth about Churchill’s ‘Racist Epithets’“. -R.Langworth
In your response to Tej Prakash Negi, you seem to suggest that Churchill’s friendships with Indian people prove he was not racist. Have I understood this correctly? If so, why do you think a friendship with Indian people erases the possibility (in my opinion, the fact) that he was racist, or, at the very least, that he said racist things?
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His friendship with Indians is but one of many factors in his favor. There are others, far more important, starting with his constant support for human rights and native populations as early as 1899—often to his political disadvantage. The problem is the semantics of “racism,” which is now applied to everyone from Bull Connor to a former senator who got somebody’s name wrong. Saying a nation (not a race) multiplies like rabbits (if he said it) is not racist. For a multitude of racist expressions, read Mr. Amery’s diaries. —RML
I find it astonishing that there is absolutely no mention of Burma falling to the Japanese—a strategic reason which Churchill used to not ship food to the famine stricken parts of Bengal. I am also disappointed to note that there is no mention of the riots and loot that happened as a result of the famine in parts of East Bengal. Indeed the famine appears to not have had an impact within erstwhile West Bengal, Calcutta being part of it. Across the borders, several Hindu Zamindars had to flee parts of East Bengal where the farmers were primarily Muslims. This, unfortunately, included my Grandfather who fled dressed as a Muslim from his ancestral village in Noakhali, where most of his family’s throats were slit and hung by the village trees as a show of mutiny against resident Hindu merchants. He led a life of a refugee thereafter, thanks to Churchill.
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Dr. Masani replies: My article dealt primarily with accusations against Churchill, rather than causes of the famine. I did mention Japanese occupation of Burma and submarines in Bay of Bengal as major factors. I’m afraid there was little Churchill could have done about Hindu-Muslim tensions exacerbated by famine.
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Editors’ note: Your first statement is incorrect since, despite Japanese submarines, Churchill sent 130,000 tons from Iraq and Australia in August, the moment he heard of the famine, and over a million tons from Australia during the emergency. Churchill did write to Wavell, the new Viceroy (8 October 1943): “Every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with local shortages….Every effort should be made by you to assuage the strife between the Hindus and Moslems and to induce them to work together for the common good.”
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Elsewhere on this site please refer to:
Arthur Herman, “Absent Churchill, the Bengal Famine Would Have Been Worse.”
Abhijit Sarkar, “The Effects of Race and Caste on Relief in the Bengal Famine.”
Churchill Project: “Did Churchill Exacerbate the Bengal Famine?”
Andrew Roberts & Zewditu Gebreyohanes, “The Racial Consequences of Mr. Churchill” (Part 5)
The British destroyed a complete chronicle of events and the devastation at that time, attempting to exonerate their leaders. A very simple question, if this had happened in England, would the British leader blind-sighted this? When resources were anyways diverted from India for wartime effort, should this not have been given timely action? Even when help did come, it was too late. Yet these were preventable deaths. Indeed Allied wartime activities were prioritized over needs in Bengal. And the fact that even Wavell could not get his leader’s attention on time is a lamentable fact, like the fact that British made several attempts to erase the high handedness that went behind this, doubt the veracity that the news of the famine reached England late. Does it take an year for anyone to realize what is happening, even for 6 months and when the death toll has risen, does it take someone to just wake up one fine day and realize something is amiss, clearly this is where action OR rather inactions are questionable.
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Dr. Masani replies:
“There was no delay in reporting or responding to the famine. The Viceroy and London War Cabinet were made aware of it as soon as most local administrators were. Ending the famine was one of the key priorities listed in Churchill’s initial appointment of Wavell as Viceroy. The War Cabinet minutes are full of decisions to send food supplies to Bengal, and Government of India minutes record their arrival. You can easily check this in the archives. No food was diverted from Bengal, though the needs of troops fighting the Japanese invasion DID get priority. Over a million tons of grain were imported to Bengal that year to end the famine, which was achieved in a year. It might have been sooner without bungling by local Indian politicians and speculation by Indian grain merchants.”
Did someone actually say this: I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits?
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According to hearsay, Churchill said the first, reacting to disputacious bureaucrats in Delhi; and something like the second. There is only one source, Leo Amery’s diary. For the background see “Hearsay Doesn’t Count” at https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/churchills-racist-epithets/
RML
Thank you so much for this. Now I feel I have some knowledge to counter the tearing down of one of Britain’s finest. It’s quite disheartening when I hear my British grandchildren make reference to the supposed “hidden history” of Churchill and the Bengal Famine. But I must admit that I have also had fun when I express my amazement and mock-clutch my pearls at finding such young conspiracy theorists within my own family! They of course deny that they believe in conspiracy and so we begin to discuss just where the truth lies… People who want to consume such distortions of history appear to come from a place of malevolence and resentment. Thanks Hillsdale.
“They also need to be seen in the context of his penchant for making outrageous comments that he didn’t really mean in order to shock or tease:”
Please hear yourself. Isn’t it convenient to say racial slurs and say he didn’t really mean it? The view of the Bengal Famine from Churchill’s project is extremely biased, he may be one of the better British politicians but that doesn’t wipe out all the racial comments he made about East Indian people. Even though you interpret Churchill’s comment as to tease or shock Amery, No man without any prejudice towards race will utter anything like this.
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No man today will. Another reader writes: “One does not have to think back far to remember the race-related barbs and jokes quite common and somewhat accepted by non-racist society.” By contrast, you offer an example of William Manchester called Generational Chauvinism. —Ed.
This is your opinion. You can stick with it. There are plenty of evidence out there which proves the other way.
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Dr. Masani says he’ll stick with it. It’d be nice to sign your name. Dr. Masani did.
As to the comment of “Indian indian” below, it is exceedingly frustrating to have a commenter allege (anonymously) that “there are [sic] plenty of evidence out there which proves the other way” and yet fail to provide a single bit of it. Perhaps an inference might be drawn from that failure.
Thank you for publishing this article. The tendency by lesser academics and journalists to attack historical figures like Churchill are troubling developments of the woke environment in which we find ourselves. In Canada our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, has been vilified based on half truths and cherry picking facts to support a narrative. His name is being removed from schools and public buildings to satisfy the mob. Other victims are Egerton Ryerson and Dundas. None of these figures are alive to defend themselves, and anyone who tries to defend them is subject to attacks and cancellation. We have many schools and public facilities named after Churchill and articles such as this help to deal with the uninformed public and media.