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The article says: "Thanks to Churchill’s personal decisions, more than 3 million Bengalis died of hunger in a 1943 famine. Churchill deliberately ordered the d

The article says: "Thanks to Churchill’s personal decisions, more than 3 million Bengalis died of hunger in a 1943 famine. Churchill deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles, meant for yet-to-be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs. “The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious” than that of “sturdy Greeks,” he argued. When reminded of the suffering of Bengalis, his response was typically Churchillian: The famine was the Indians’ own fault, he said, for “breeding like rabbits.” If the suffering was so dire, he wrote on the file, “Why hasn’t Gandhi died yet?" People argue it wasn't Churchill's fault. Specifically [1], which says that the fall of Burma to the Japanese cut off Indian import sources and the wartime element meant "tough decisions" were made. It argues that in peacetime things would be different. That really doesn't make sense. If you look at the history of famine's in India under British rule [2], over 35MM people died due to famines, and the majority of those are due to imperial mismanagement. In democratic governments, you can vote out people who aren't solving the problem. Not so in colonial societies. This source [3] puts it clearly: "Throughout the autumn of 1943, the United Kingdom's food and raw materials stockpile for its 47 million people - 14 million fewer than that of Bengal - swelled to 18.5m tonnes. In the end, Mukherjee writes eloquently, it was "not so much racism as the imbalance of power inherent in the social Darwinian pyramid that explains why famine could be tolerated in India while bread rationing was regarded as an intolerable deprivation in wartime Britain". To us Indians, Winston Churchill is Hitler and what happened in Bengal is an Indian Holocaust. It is appropriate to call it "revisionist history" because the Indian and more generally Eastern perspective is not present in modern history. That is slowly changing thanks to modern scholarship and I think we will view Winston Churchill very differently in 50 years. All men are flawed. Churchill did some very good things for England, and some very very bad things for India, Kenya, etc. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, etc. very all very charismatic and had strong leadership characteristics, but you cannot praise them publicly for "their good parts." It is crazy to me that we still do that with Churchill. I was glad when Obama sent the bust back to England. [1] https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the-media/churchill-in-the-news/bengali-famine/ https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/in-the-media/churchil... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_I... [3] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10/how_churchill_starved_india.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/soutikbiswas/2010/10...

crazygringo 8y ago
Fascinating thanks, I never knew about this, so I became curious about the causes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Debate_about_causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Debate_a... It certainly seems like an area of controversy, but is it so clear cut that it was Churchill's fault? It seems like the main takeaways are: > Academic consensus generally follows the FEE account, as formulated by A. Sen (1977) and A. Sen (1981a), in describing the Bengal famine of 1943 as an "entitlements famine". On this view, the prelude to the famine was generalised war-time inflation, and the problem was exacerbated by prioritised distribution and abortive attempts at price control,[323] but the death blow was devastating leaps in the inflation rate due to heavy speculative buying.[324][AZ] This in turn caused a fatal decline in the real wages of landless agricultural workers,[325] transforming what should have been a local shortage into a horrific famine.[326] If that's the case, was this clearly foreseeable or not, and were there alternatives? And it continues: > More recent analyses often stress political factors.[BA] Discussions of the government's role split into two broad camps: those which suggest that the government unwittingly caused or was unable to respond to the crisis,[327] and those which assert that the government willfully caused or ignored the plight of starving Indians. The former see the problem as a series of avoidable war-time policy failures and "panicky responses"[138] from a government that was spectacularly inept,[328] overwhelmed[329] and in disarray; the latter as a conscious miscarriage of justice by the "ruling colonial elite"[330] who abandoned the poor of Bengal.[331] The article doesn't mention if there's a current academic consensus on whether it was inept wartime panicking or conscious, however. Is the narrative of "Churchill as Hitler to India" really justifiable, or just as simplistic as Churchill as Savior? I'm genuinely interested here, since I was never taught about this, and also curious why your comment is so downvoted.
- cthaeh 8y ago
  It's kinda obvious why its down-voted. Most people in on this site are western and are biased against this sort of information.
- mturmon 8y ago
  Your quoted excerpt intrigued me. The quoted scholar is none other than Amartya Sen, the Bengali economist and intellectual (Nobel prize in Economics, now at Harvard). Born in 1933, Sen was 10 years old at the time of the famine and witnessed it firsthand. He later investigated the cause of the famine and published articles and finally a book on it. This research led to the notion (simplifying here) that famines have a key component that is distributional in nature - that economic or social conditions (like income inequality) can cause a relatively small food shock to turn into a famine. This is what he found in Bengal. Sen's essays in NYRB (https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/amartya-sen/ https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/amartya-sen/) are excellent. The Mukherjee book (source [3] in the GP comment) placing blame for the Bengal famine on Churchill received a mixed review by another author (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/12/23/did-churchill-let-them-starve/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/12/23/did-churchill-le...).

crazygringo 8y ago

Fascinating thanks, I never knew about this, so I became curious about the causes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Debate_about_causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943#Debate_a... It certainly seems like an area of controversy, but is it so clear cut that it was Churchill's fault? It seems like the main takeaways are: > Academic consensus generally follows the FEE account, as formulated by A. Sen (1977) and A. Sen (1981a), in describing the Bengal famine of 1943 as an "entitlements famine". On this view, the prelude to the famine was generalised war-time inflation, and the problem was exacerbated by prioritised distribution and abortive attempts at price control,[323] but the death blow was devastating leaps in the inflation rate due to heavy speculative buying.[324][AZ] This in turn caused a fatal decline in the real wages of landless agricultural workers,[325] transforming what should have been a local shortage into a horrific famine.[326] If that's the case, was this clearly foreseeable or not, and were there alternatives? And it continues: > More recent analyses often stress political factors.[BA] Discussions of the government's role split into two broad camps: those which suggest that the government unwittingly caused or was unable to respond to the crisis,[327] and those which assert that the government willfully caused or ignored the plight of starving Indians. The former see the problem as a series of avoidable war-time policy failures and "panicky responses"[138] from a government that was spectacularly inept,[328] overwhelmed[329] and in disarray; the latter as a conscious miscarriage of justice by the "ruling colonial elite"[330] who abandoned the poor of Bengal.[331] The article doesn't mention if there's a current academic consensus on whether it was inept wartime panicking or conscious, however. Is the narrative of "Churchill as Hitler to India" really justifiable, or just as simplistic as Churchill as Savior? I'm genuinely interested here, since I was never taught about this, and also curious why your comment is so downvoted.

cthaeh 8y ago
It's kinda obvious why its down-voted. Most people in on this site are western and are biased against this sort of information.
mturmon 8y ago
Your quoted excerpt intrigued me. The quoted scholar is none other than Amartya Sen, the Bengali economist and intellectual (Nobel prize in Economics, now at Harvard). Born in 1933, Sen was 10 years old at the time of the famine and witnessed it firsthand. He later investigated the cause of the famine and published articles and finally a book on it. This research led to the notion (simplifying here) that famines have a key component that is distributional in nature - that economic or social conditions (like income inequality) can cause a relatively small food shock to turn into a famine. This is what he found in Bengal. Sen's essays in NYRB (https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/amartya-sen/ https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/amartya-sen/) are excellent. The Mukherjee book (source [3] in the GP comment) placing blame for the Bengal famine on Churchill received a mixed review by another author (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/12/23/did-churchill-let-them-starve/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/12/23/did-churchill-le...).