Prominent Indian analyst Moen Gurushwami recalls: “Winston Churchill was as much a mass murderer as Adolf Hitler. Hitler killed 6 million Jews in concentration camps, Churchill killed 4 million Indians, depriving them of food. Nevertheless, many people and organizations in India still seem to revere this man …
THE FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST OF INDIA
The Bengal Holodomor of 1943-44 must be regarded as the greatest disaster on the subcontinent of the 20th century. Nearly 4 million Indians have died in an artificial famine created by the British government, which is barely mentioned in Indian history books.
The Second World War was in full swing, and the Germans were frantically exterminating Jews, Slavs and Roma throughout Europe.
However, it took Hitler and his Nazi cohorts 12 years to exterminate 6 million Jews. Their Teutonic cousins, the British, were able to exterminate almost 4 million Indians immeasurably faster - in just over a year. The efficiency of Prime Minister Winston Churchill should have earned the applause of the Nazis.
Australian biochemist Dr. Gideon Poya called the Bengali famine a "man-made disaster" directly caused by Churchill's policies.
Bengal reaped a bountiful harvest in 1942 in 1942, but the British brought huge quantities of grain to England, creating a terrible food shortage there.
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Madusri Mekerji tracked down some of the survivors and paints a chilling picture of the effects of hunger and hardship. In Churchill's Secret War, she writes: “Parents threw their starving children into rivers and wells. Many committed suicide by throwing themselves under trains. The starving people begged for water, in which the lucky few boiled rice. The children ate leaves and vines, yam stalks and grass. People were too weak to even cremate their loved ones … Dogs and jackals feasted on piles of corpses in the villages of Bengal."
Those who managed to escape in time accumulated in Calcutta. Women in an attempt to feed their families became prostitutes. “Mothers turned into murderers, villages turned into suppliers of whores, fathers into pimps for daughters,” Mukherjee writes.
Mani Beyomik, the inventor of excimer eye surgery, remembered this hunger forever: his grandmother died because she gave him some of her food.
By 1943, Calcutta was inundated with hordes of starving people, most of whom died in the streets. The sight of well-fed white British soldiers against the backdrop of an apocalyptic landscape was "the final decision on British rule in India," said Jawaharlal Nehru.
Churchill could have easily prevented hunger. Even a few consignments of food grains would have helped, but the British prime minister flatly rejected calls from two governors, his own secretary for Indian affairs and even the president of the United States.
Sabhas Chandra Bose, an Indian freedom fighter who was then fighting on the side of the Axis forces, offered to send rice from Myanmar, but the English censors did not even allow his proposal to be transmitted.
Churchill was completely ruthless in siphoning food out of Bengal for the benefit of British troops and Greek civilians. According to him, "hunger is less severe for malnourished Bengalis than for strong Greeks."
The British Secretary of State for India and Burma, Leopold Emery, although he was an ardent supporter of colonial politics, denounced Churchill's attitude towards Bengalis as "worthy of Hitler."
Churchill responded to the pleas of Emery and the Viceroy of India, Archibald Wavell, to send part of the food supplies to India by telegram asking why Gandhi had not yet died.
Wavell reported that the famine "was one of the greatest calamities that befell any people under British rule." When Holland needs food, he said, "ships will of course be available, but we get a very different answer when we ask ships to bring food to India."
Churchill is still justified by the fact that he allegedly did not have ships for emergency food supplies to India, but Mukherjee unearthed official documents refuting this, according to which ships carrying grain from Australia deliberately bypassed India on their way to the Mediterranean Sea.
Churchill's hostility towards Indians as such has long been documented. At a meeting of the War Cabinet, he blamed the Indians themselves for the famine, saying that they "breed like rabbits." His attitude towards Indians is concentrated in his words to Emery: “I hate Indians. They are brutal people with a bestial religion. " On another occasion, he insisted that Indians, like Germans, be treated like beasts throughout the world.
According to Mukherjee, "Churchill's attitude toward India was quite extreme and he hated Indians, mainly because he knew that India could not be kept under British rule for long."
She writes in The Huffington Post: “Churchill considered wheat to be too precious to spend on non-whites, let alone recalcitrant subjects demanding independence from the British Empire. He preferred to stockpile grain supplies to feed the Europeans at the end of the war."
At the height of the famine, in October 1943, Churchill said at a lavish banquet: “When we look back a year, we see this part of the land where there has been no war for three generations … This time will undoubtedly go down in Indian history as the Golden century when the British gave the Indians peace and order, ensured justice for the poor and protected all people from external dangers.
Churchill was not only a racist, but also a liar. But, of course, his policy towards the starving people of Bengal was no different from all previous British policy in India.
At the end of the Victorian Holocaust, Mike Davis pointed out that there were 31 severe famines in India in 120 years of British rule, compared with 17 times in the 2000 years prior to British rule. In his book, Davis recounts the famine that killed up to 29 million Indians - and argues that these people were killed by British government policy.
In 1876, when a drought ravaged the farmers of the Deccan Plateau, India had a net surplus of rice and wheat. But Viceroy Robert Bulwer-Lytton insisted on the complete removal of any obstacles to their export to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain traders exported record volumes of grain, and government officials ordered "every possible way to prevent aid" to the starving.
The only relief permitted in most areas was the creation of labor camps in which workers, even those employed in heavy labor, received less food than the Buchenwald prisoners.
Even after the deaths of millions, Lytton ignored any attempts to alleviate the suffering of millions of still living peasants and focused on preparations for the proclamation of Queen Victoria as Empress of India. The culmination of the celebrations on this occasion was a weeklong celebration, at which 68,000 dignitaries heard her promise to the nation of "happiness, prosperity and well-being."
In light of the above, it is not surprising that Hitler's favorite film was The Life of a Bengal Lancer, which featured British politics in India. The Nazi leader attributed his love for the film to then-British Foreign Secretary Edward Wood (Earl of Halifax) by the fact that the film showed "how a superior race should behave." This film was a must-see for the SS.
… Other nationalities show us a good example. Israel, for example, cannot forget about the Holocaust and will not let others forget about it - and Germany continues to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in money and weapons to aid Israel.
Armenia cannot forget the great crime - the systematic massacre of 1.8 million Armenians by the Turks during the First World War.
The Chinese want a clear apology and compensation from the Japanese for at least 400,000 people killed and raped in Nanjing …
And only one India refuses to ask not only for damages, but even for an apology.
Could it be because the British were the last in a long list of invaders, and England is already suffering from post-imperial depression?
Or are we simply doomed to repeat our historical mistakes?
Perhaps we forgive too easily.
But forgiveness is different from oblivion, in which Indians are guilty: it is an insult to the memory of millions of Indians whose lives have been cut short by artificially organized hunger.
British attitudes towards Indians must be judged against India's contribution to the Allied military campaign.
By 1943, over 2.5 million Indian soldiers were fighting alongside allies in Europe, Africa and Southeast Asia. Huge quantities of weapons, ammunition and raw materials obtained from all over India were shipped to Europe at no cost to Britain.
Britain's debt to India is too great to be ignored by any nation … All of Europe will not have enough wealth to compensate India for the consequences of 250 years of colonial plunder.
But even without money - do the English at least have the gratitude to apologize? Or do they, like Churchill, continue to deceive themselves by claiming that English rule was India's Golden Age?"
This is the Boer camp. Mikhail Delyagin noted: “The monstrous cruelty of the British shocks the imagination - no less than their cynical deceit: they without a shadow of a doubt declare their murders and robbery a blessing for those whom they kill and rob, and under favorable circumstances they also demand rewards for this from their own victims!
However, the Indians, as we see, are getting closer to asserting their rights - and by this they give an example for us as well. The British, like the Americans, and other interventionists committed terrible atrocities in Russia during the civil war, and before that organized the overthrow of Nicholas II and influenced the Provisional Government in the strongest way, and must not escape responsibility for their crimes against Russia."