“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” These are the words of a racist leader, who was content with millions of innocent people perishing. This monster’s name was Winston Churchill.
As Hindustan celebrates the prospects of an incredible future, hitting its 75th year of independence, it is critical that we also look back at the evils that this great nation has faced.
In 1943, amidst the Second World War, famine emerged in the state of Bengal. The situation rapidly became dire and, within time, death by starvation became rampant. Friends saw their friends suffering in front of them. Mothers witnessed their partners dying, before succumbing to death themselves. Children would then see their mothers lose their lives, before they too had succumbed to the horrendous realities of Bengal. As the days, and months passed by, more and more Bengali families were seen dying on the streets, with wild dogs consuming their carcasses. This was replicated across the state of Bengal, by the millions.
This was no freak incident of nature – a modern study by researchers has shown that there was no evidence of drought or climatic issues that led to this horrendous tragedy. So, what was the cause? It was the actions taken by the British empire – more precisely, the actions of Winston Churchill. To quote the aforementioned study, the famine was “completely due to the failure of policy during the British Era.”
Churchill was quite knowledgeable of the food shortages in Bengal as soon as they began. He was fully aware of the fact that this situation was rapidly deteriorating, and that people were perishing en masse. However, his response was not to import food into Bengal to put an end to the issue. Instead, he did the precise opposite – he exported massive amounts of food to England, in areas where there were massive stockpiles, and great excesses.
When Churchill knew that Bengali citizens were dying, by the millions – why was he doing this? It was because he was a racist white-supremacist; the death of Indians meant nothing to him; in fact, he was pleased by their deaths. According to Churchill, the famine was the Indians’ fault because they were “breeding like rabbits.” When pressed further on the need to put an end to this, Churchill’s simple response was “why hasn’t died Gandhi yet?”
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To put it plain, and simple – Churchill’s policy in Bengal was mass murder. Though it was not by the same course of action as the Nazi’s extermination camps, the scale and outcome of Bengal Holocaust was comparable to what happened to the Jews in Germany. Both horrendous atrocities were driven, and exacerbated, by the racism of the ‘leaders’: Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, respectively. Saying this does not undermine how appalling the Jewish Holocaust was, it simply appropriately highlights just how the horrific and vile this man-made tragedy, Bengal Holocaust, truly was.
For the sake of the millions of innocent Bengali men, women, and children who died unnecessary deaths by a single racist monster, we must always remember just how evil Winston Churchill really was. He deserves a spot in the history books right alongside Adolf Hitler.
Jai Hind
Sources
Britannica (n.d.) 9 Things You Might Not Know About Adolf Hitler. https://www.britannica.com/list/9-things-you-might-not-know-about-adolf-hitler
English Heritage. (n.d.) Churchill, Sir Winston K.G. (1874-1965). https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/winston-churchill/
Mishra, V., Tiwari, A. D., Aadhar, S., Shah, R., Xiao, M., Pai, D. S., & Lettenmaier, D. (2019). Drought and famine in India, 1870–2016. Geophysical Research Letters, 46(4), 2075-2083.
Mukerjee, M. (2011). Churchill’s secret war: The British empire and the ravaging of India during World War II. Basic Books.
Mukerjee, M. (2010). Winston Churchill’s Plan for Post-war India. Economic and Political Weekly, 27-30.
Resurgent India. (2016). The Bengal Famine of 1943: How the British Engineered One of the Worst Genocides in the Human History. http://new.resurgentindia.org/the-bengal-famine-of-1943-how-the-british-engineered-one-of-the-worst-genocides-in-the-human-history/
Sen, A. Development as freedom (1999). Anchor.
Tharoor, S. (2018). Inglorious empire. Penguin Books.
