4 – Churchill allowed the deaths of 3 million Indians during the Bengal Famine

“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

Churchill’s Indian obsession was not done with, and once he had ascended to the position of Prime Minister during the Second World War, it would reach its lowest ebb. While the war was raging in Europe, North Africa and the Pacific – a war in which an estimated 2.5 million Indians fought for Britain, with 87,000 being killed – back home in Bengal, a horrendous famine struck. The region, centred on Kolkata and encompassing much of modern Bangladesh, was predominantly rural and agricultural, with much of the population living on subsistence farming, so when a combination of rice crop disease, cyclones and changes in agricultural practices came together, the devastation was massive.

That said, the rest of India was less affected, not to mention the rest of the empire. The Raj government refused to trade grain to Bengal and the British back home would not countenance sending relief to India. According to Indian historian Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill’s War Cabinet “ordered the build-up of a stockpile of wheat for feeding European civilians after they had been liberated. So 170,000 tons of Australian wheat bypassed starving India – destined not for consumption but for storage,” as well as exporting rice from India at a time when millions were dying back in Bengal. “The War Cabinet’s shipping assignments made in August 1943, shortly after Amery had pleaded for famine relief, show Australian wheat flour travelling to Ceylon, the Middle East, and Southern Africa – everywhere in the Indian Ocean but to India. Those assignments show a will to punish,” continues Mukerjee.

This imperialist logic will not surprise many with a knowledge of the history of the British Empire – they did the same in Ireland in the 1840s, among other places – but it is certainly indicative of the priorities at the top of the Churchill regime and the huge fall in the importance of India to the United Kingdom.

Indian economists, most notably Amartya Sen, have argued that there was absolutely no shortage of food in India and that it was the inadequate economic policies of the colonial government that caused the famine, while there is concrete evidence that Churchill actively refused donations of food from both the Americans and the Canadians during the height of the Bengal famine. An estimated 3 million people died.

Whether not sending relief to India helped the war effort back home is intangible, but the effects on the nationalist movement in the Raj was huge. Many had argued on behalf of India entering the war on the Allied side with independence as a price, but the British had never accepted such a deal. Now, even the last remnants of those who thought Indian independence impossible began to change their minds. Britain had shown that it cared little for the fates of Indians, and that it was quite incompetent in organising an effective government too. Once the Second World War ended, the inevitable happened and, after nearly 300 years in control on the subcontinent, India would finally govern itself again.

The best words to summarise Churchill’s view on India might be those of Leo Amery, the Secretary of State for India at the time of the Bengal Famine. He wrote that “on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane… I didn’t see much difference between his outlook and Hitler’s.” Of course, the Indians were not the only people that Churchill did not care for: there were plenty of others too. While he may have been part of forces that defeated the Nazis and saved untold Jewish lives, he himself had very little time for them…