Culpable Genocide: The artificial famine, Bengal 1942-1943.
Background:
1941 was a trying time for the British everywhere. General (later Field Marschall) Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox was pounding the merry hell out of the Brits in the desert, El Alamein and Stalingrad were many months and many lives ahead, Barbarossa had not yet begun and things were bleak. India, or British India was also part of the war effort, not by choice, but by coercion (the Defence of India Act). The Indian freedom movement was divided between the choice of doing what seemed like the honourable thing and working to help the Allies during the war and taking full advantage of England’s preoccupation in Europe to push the cause for total independence further. Sentiments in the mainstream freedom movement, as exemplified by members of the Indian National Congress (INC) were leaning towards supporting the British, perhaps in an effort to gain goodwill and accelerate the process to a peaceful transition to Home Rule after the war.
Netaji and the INA:
A small faction, principally lead by the Bengali nationalist Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose leaned towards armed insurrection. On the 19th of January, 1941, Netaji escaped from house arrest in Calcutta and made a very circuitous journey to Berlin where he was received by von Rippentrop and the Wilhelmstrasse. Meanwhile the British Special Operations Executive, apart from its usual duties of helping the French Resistance put a dent in the Waffen SS’s shining armour, was also asked to assassinate this pesky Indian. They didn’t, or couldn’t, but this is only to indicate the seriousness with which the British regarded Netaji, even if he was ‘discredited’ within the Indian National Congress for holding ideas which ran counter to the non violent ideals of Mahatma Gandhi. (This led Netaji to raise the Forward Bloc, which is, till today, regarded as the most respected and idealistic of the Indian Left parties.) Eventually Netaji made his way to Japan where with the blessing of the Imperial Government, he was able to raise the Indian National Army. This army was composed mainly of Indian POWs from the British Indian Army. The story of the INA, with Netaji’s call of ‘tum mujhe khoon do, main tumhe azadi doonga’ (give me blood, and I will give you freedom) is something, which deserves to be better told elsewhere and separately. I have been talking about Netaji merely to drive home the point that the 1941-43 was a trying time for the Allies when Normandy and victory seemed impossibly far away.
Japanese action:
Japan had ‘awakened a vengeful sleeping giant’ on the 7th of December, 1941. But for the moment, the giant’s hammerstroke was stayed, and for the moment, fast carrier groups ruled the Eastern Pacific. On the 15th of February, 1942, Lt. General Arthur Percival surrendered the Allied garrison at Singapore to General Tomoyuki Yamashita. The Japanese had fielded a mere 30 000 troops, compared to almost 110 000 Allies. Their victory was in part due to far superior coordination and logistics and the Allies lack of armored regiments. The air battle was won on the wings of the superlative Mitsubishi Zero (which ruled the Pacific skies until much later in the war, when it was swept from the skies by vastly superior numbers of P38 Lightning’s and P51 Mustang’s).
Defence of India (DI) Act and stockpiling of rations:
Early in 1941, the British Indian Government started stockpiling rations for the armed forces. Midnapore had traditionally been a surplus district. It had also, traditionally been a hotbed of nationalist insurrection, giving the nation martyrs like Khudiram Bose and Satyendranath Basu. Thus, by procuring rice from Mednipore, the British could serve their (“legitimate”) wartime interest while starving this rebellious district to its knees. In the meantime, the autumn 1941 harvest had failed in eastern Mednipore (now Indian Mednipore). This did not dissuade the zealous British administration in carrying out its task, however. Procurement went on. On the 6th of April, 1942, buoyed by their successes in Singapore, the Malay peninsula and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Japanese launched raids against the Bay of Bengal ports of Kakinada and Vishakapatnam (present day Vizag). Fearful of a seaborne invasion from the Bay of Bengal, the British instituted a policy of denial of resources to the enemy along the delta. This quickly changed to a “scorched earth” policy, not much different from what Hitler did in the closing days of WW2 in Europe. In this riverine district, boats were frequently the only reliable mode of transportation. Those boats, which could not be moved deep inland (as far as 90 miles) as per British orders were sunk. Buses, trucks and other modes of land transport were withdrawn. Mednipore was cut off from the rest of the country with no way to move food, oil and any essential apart from British army resources. Needless to say, these resources were not available to the populace. Allied troops began massing in the district, anticipating a Japanese invasion. The Japanese had just taken Burma, cutting off cheap rice exports to Bengal. What they had provided, and provided in droves, instead of rice was an unending stream of refugees who would strain already scarce food supplies.
Elsewhere in the Nation; the Quit India Movement:
Talks between England’s delegate extraordinary, Stanford Cripps and leaders of the Indian freedom movement to obtain Indian cooperation during the war had failed. On the 14th of July, 1942, the Indian National Congress passed its resolution demanding “Poorna Swarajya”, or Total Freedom. This was not something that garnered unqualified support from all of India. The Communist Party of India, the Hindu Mahasabha did not fully support the Congress. The Muslim League, under the leadership of Muhammad Al Jinnah (who would become famous as the Quaid-e-Azam of Pakistan) found this an excellent opportunity to widen the wedge between Indians and Indians wider.. the wedge that would eventually culminate in the bloodshed of the Partition. On the 8th of August, 1942, Mahatma Gandhi started the Quit India Movement at the Bombay session of the INC. His call was for peaceful non-cooperation. The British responded quickly and savagely. The very next day, Gandhiji was imprisoned and senior members of the Congress Party Working Committee were arrested. Along with them, about 100, 000 common, or garden-variety freedom fighters were arrested nationwide. The Congress Party was banned, freedom fighters were publicly whipped, and every form of punitive action that a vengeful and fearful administration could bring to bear was used.
Insurrection in Mednipore:
Near the end of September, the people of Kanthi and Tamluk regions in Mednipore rose in revolt. Telegraph poles were cut down, roads were dug up, and culverts were blown up, in fact all of those things that the French Resistance was busy doing in Occupied France was being done here. The British could scarcely tolerate a revolt on this scale in a region that would be the beachhead for Japanese forces, if their attention turned to the Bay of Bengal. The administration struck back with a vengeance. Hundreds were rounded up and summarily executed. The Royal Air Force was called in to bomb the centres of rebellion to submission.
Cyclone:
The Bay of Bengal has long been, quite literally a stormy region. The coastline is periodically battered by severe tropical storms and cyclones. Take for example, the Supercyclone 05B in 1999 which hit ravaged coastal state of Orissa. The damage inflicted rises in proportion to population density, and the coast of West Bengal is one of the most densely populated regions in the world.
On the 16th of October, 1942, a tropical cyclone made landfall near Kanthi. Gales reaching up to 255 km/hr were reported. The Cyclone Warning Centre of the Indian Meteorological Department at Calcutta issued warnings: warnings which should have been passed along by the District Collectorate to the population; and were not. How many lives an early warning could have saved is not known. What is known is the damage that was wreaked. About 7400 villages in an area of 3300 sq.miles were affected. 786 villages in Kanthi and Tamluk were wiped off the map, leaving no trace. Some 2.5 million were affected. The word “affected” is a nice one. It can be used to signify a lot of things with little, or no emotional association. Just what does “affected” mean anyway? In this case it means that an affected person has probably lost part or all of his family to flood waters, that the affected person has probably been starving until rescue people reach him. In case there are no rescue people, the affected person will starve to death. In case he doesn’t actually starve to death, he will probably die of cholera, because when there is no drinking water, people drink the same water they defecate into, and cholera happens to be a waterborne disease. This, and other diseases are unfortunate by products of floods and cyclones. However, back to the topic at hand. About 1.9 million cattle heads were drowned. Saline flood waters had rendered all drinking water unfit. There was no food. There was no water for Mednipore.
Communications Blackout:
Wartime censorship, coupled with the fact that Mednipore was actually under attack by the British for daring to hoist the flag meant that the rest of India did not know what was happening. The British administration ‘helped’ things along by confiscating what pitiful remnants of food supplies there were for feeding their troops. For some fifteen days after the cyclone, news of the tragedy did not reach the outside world. Again, ‘outside world’ has to be understood as Calcutta and the rest of India. The ‘world’ was busy containing one Adolf and didn’t have time for such petty things as a few million Bengalis starving. Legitimate relief workers from Calcutta were jailed. Observers who reached Mednipore in early December villagers subsisting on decaying, rotten black rice, which smelled of decaying flesh. Thus began the great Bengal Famine of 1942 and 1943.
The Famine:
What relief was available from the rest of the beleaguered nation was denied to Mednipore. This might at first be attributed to an apathetic administration, or an administration preoccupied with war at its doorstep. But circumspect reasoning cannot, but come to the inevitable conclusion that this carnage, and indeed it was carnage was well orchestrated and pre meditated. The District Collectorate COULD have issued storm warnings. It did not not. The administration COULD have rushed food and medical supplies immediately in the aftermath of the cyclone. It did not. The work of Nobel Laurate Amartya Sen has proved that overall shortages of rice production were not enough to cause such widespread famine.
Year Rice production for Mednipore
(in million of tons)
1938 8.474
1939 7.922
1940 8.223
1941 6.768
1942 9.296
1943 7.628
Prof. Sen argues that hoarding of food, caused in part by actual shortages, and in part by the very real shortage (which was, however, localized, and could have been easily reversed by imports from other states) and a rising black market lead to rice simply being priced out of the reach of the common man.
The British Raj created this artificial famine. The British presided over the slow death by starvation and disease of approximately five million Bengalis. They were responsible for the murder of these people. This was genocide. It cannot be termed anything else by apologists or others. Hitler’s score in six years was some six million Jews. Churchill’s score was only marginally less: five million Bengalis.
Note: I started writing this article after a conversation with my father regarding the way things worked out during the war. This essay follows very closely an earlier article written by Padmabhushan Prof. Tapan Roy Choudhury (Professor Emeritus of Indian History and Civilization in the University of Oxford) which appeared in the Calcutta Statesman in late 2005.
Online Readings:
1.http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/timeline/factfiles/nonflash/a1138673.shtml?sectionId=4&articleId=1138673
2.http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/timeline/factfiles/nonflash/a1138673.shtml?sectionId=4&articleId=1138673
3.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
4.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_05B_(1999)#Impact
5.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_of_India_Act
Background:
1941 was a trying time for the British everywhere. General (later Field Marschall) Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox was pounding the merry hell out of the Brits in the desert, El Alamein and Stalingrad were many months and many lives ahead, Barbarossa had not yet begun and things were bleak. India, or British India was also part of the war effort, not by choice, but by coercion (the Defence of India Act). The Indian freedom movement was divided between the choice of doing what seemed like the honourable thing and working to help the Allies during the war and taking full advantage of England’s preoccupation in Europe to push the cause for total independence further. Sentiments in the mainstream freedom movement, as exemplified by members of the Indian National Congress (INC) were leaning towards supporting the British, perhaps in an effort to gain goodwill and accelerate the process to a peaceful transition to Home Rule after the war.
Netaji and the INA:
A small faction, principally lead by the Bengali nationalist Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose leaned towards armed insurrection. On the 19th of January, 1941, Netaji escaped from house arrest in Calcutta and made a very circuitous journey to Berlin where he was received by von Rippentrop and the Wilhelmstrasse. Meanwhile the British Special Operations Executive, apart from its usual duties of helping the French Resistance put a dent in the Waffen SS’s shining armour, was also asked to assassinate this pesky Indian. They didn’t, or couldn’t, but this is only to indicate the seriousness with which the British regarded Netaji, even if he was ‘discredited’ within the Indian National Congress for holding ideas which ran counter to the non violent ideals of Mahatma Gandhi. (This led Netaji to raise the Forward Bloc, which is, till today, regarded as the most respected and idealistic of the Indian Left parties.) Eventually Netaji made his way to Japan where with the blessing of the Imperial Government, he was able to raise the Indian National Army. This army was composed mainly of Indian POWs from the British Indian Army. The story of the INA, with Netaji’s call of ‘tum mujhe khoon do, main tumhe azadi doonga’ (give me blood, and I will give you freedom) is something, which deserves to be better told elsewhere and separately. I have been talking about Netaji merely to drive home the point that the 1941-43 was a trying time for the Allies when Normandy and victory seemed impossibly far away.
Japanese action:
Japan had ‘awakened a vengeful sleeping giant’ on the 7th of December, 1941. But for the moment, the giant’s hammerstroke was stayed, and for the moment, fast carrier groups ruled the Eastern Pacific. On the 15th of February, 1942, Lt. General Arthur Percival surrendered the Allied garrison at Singapore to General Tomoyuki Yamashita. The Japanese had fielded a mere 30 000 troops, compared to almost 110 000 Allies. Their victory was in part due to far superior coordination and logistics and the Allies lack of armored regiments. The air battle was won on the wings of the superlative Mitsubishi Zero (which ruled the Pacific skies until much later in the war, when it was swept from the skies by vastly superior numbers of P38 Lightning’s and P51 Mustang’s).
Defence of India (DI) Act and stockpiling of rations:
Early in 1941, the British Indian Government started stockpiling rations for the armed forces. Midnapore had traditionally been a surplus district. It had also, traditionally been a hotbed of nationalist insurrection, giving the nation martyrs like Khudiram Bose and Satyendranath Basu. Thus, by procuring rice from Mednipore, the British could serve their (“legitimate”) wartime interest while starving this rebellious district to its knees. In the meantime, the autumn 1941 harvest had failed in eastern Mednipore (now Indian Mednipore). This did not dissuade the zealous British administration in carrying out its task, however. Procurement went on. On the 6th of April, 1942, buoyed by their successes in Singapore, the Malay peninsula and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Japanese launched raids against the Bay of Bengal ports of Kakinada and Vishakapatnam (present day Vizag). Fearful of a seaborne invasion from the Bay of Bengal, the British instituted a policy of denial of resources to the enemy along the delta. This quickly changed to a “scorched earth” policy, not much different from what Hitler did in the closing days of WW2 in Europe. In this riverine district, boats were frequently the only reliable mode of transportation. Those boats, which could not be moved deep inland (as far as 90 miles) as per British orders were sunk. Buses, trucks and other modes of land transport were withdrawn. Mednipore was cut off from the rest of the country with no way to move food, oil and any essential apart from British army resources. Needless to say, these resources were not available to the populace. Allied troops began massing in the district, anticipating a Japanese invasion. The Japanese had just taken Burma, cutting off cheap rice exports to Bengal. What they had provided, and provided in droves, instead of rice was an unending stream of refugees who would strain already scarce food supplies.
Elsewhere in the Nation; the Quit India Movement:
Talks between England’s delegate extraordinary, Stanford Cripps and leaders of the Indian freedom movement to obtain Indian cooperation during the war had failed. On the 14th of July, 1942, the Indian National Congress passed its resolution demanding “Poorna Swarajya”, or Total Freedom. This was not something that garnered unqualified support from all of India. The Communist Party of India, the Hindu Mahasabha did not fully support the Congress. The Muslim League, under the leadership of Muhammad Al Jinnah (who would become famous as the Quaid-e-Azam of Pakistan) found this an excellent opportunity to widen the wedge between Indians and Indians wider.. the wedge that would eventually culminate in the bloodshed of the Partition. On the 8th of August, 1942, Mahatma Gandhi started the Quit India Movement at the Bombay session of the INC. His call was for peaceful non-cooperation. The British responded quickly and savagely. The very next day, Gandhiji was imprisoned and senior members of the Congress Party Working Committee were arrested. Along with them, about 100, 000 common, or garden-variety freedom fighters were arrested nationwide. The Congress Party was banned, freedom fighters were publicly whipped, and every form of punitive action that a vengeful and fearful administration could bring to bear was used.
Insurrection in Mednipore:
Near the end of September, the people of Kanthi and Tamluk regions in Mednipore rose in revolt. Telegraph poles were cut down, roads were dug up, and culverts were blown up, in fact all of those things that the French Resistance was busy doing in Occupied France was being done here. The British could scarcely tolerate a revolt on this scale in a region that would be the beachhead for Japanese forces, if their attention turned to the Bay of Bengal. The administration struck back with a vengeance. Hundreds were rounded up and summarily executed. The Royal Air Force was called in to bomb the centres of rebellion to submission.
Cyclone:
The Bay of Bengal has long been, quite literally a stormy region. The coastline is periodically battered by severe tropical storms and cyclones. Take for example, the Supercyclone 05B in 1999 which hit ravaged coastal state of Orissa. The damage inflicted rises in proportion to population density, and the coast of West Bengal is one of the most densely populated regions in the world.
On the 16th of October, 1942, a tropical cyclone made landfall near Kanthi. Gales reaching up to 255 km/hr were reported. The Cyclone Warning Centre of the Indian Meteorological Department at Calcutta issued warnings: warnings which should have been passed along by the District Collectorate to the population; and were not. How many lives an early warning could have saved is not known. What is known is the damage that was wreaked. About 7400 villages in an area of 3300 sq.miles were affected. 786 villages in Kanthi and Tamluk were wiped off the map, leaving no trace. Some 2.5 million were affected. The word “affected” is a nice one. It can be used to signify a lot of things with little, or no emotional association. Just what does “affected” mean anyway? In this case it means that an affected person has probably lost part or all of his family to flood waters, that the affected person has probably been starving until rescue people reach him. In case there are no rescue people, the affected person will starve to death. In case he doesn’t actually starve to death, he will probably die of cholera, because when there is no drinking water, people drink the same water they defecate into, and cholera happens to be a waterborne disease. This, and other diseases are unfortunate by products of floods and cyclones. However, back to the topic at hand. About 1.9 million cattle heads were drowned. Saline flood waters had rendered all drinking water unfit. There was no food. There was no water for Mednipore.
Communications Blackout:
Wartime censorship, coupled with the fact that Mednipore was actually under attack by the British for daring to hoist the flag meant that the rest of India did not know what was happening. The British administration ‘helped’ things along by confiscating what pitiful remnants of food supplies there were for feeding their troops. For some fifteen days after the cyclone, news of the tragedy did not reach the outside world. Again, ‘outside world’ has to be understood as Calcutta and the rest of India. The ‘world’ was busy containing one Adolf and didn’t have time for such petty things as a few million Bengalis starving. Legitimate relief workers from Calcutta were jailed. Observers who reached Mednipore in early December villagers subsisting on decaying, rotten black rice, which smelled of decaying flesh. Thus began the great Bengal Famine of 1942 and 1943.
The Famine:
What relief was available from the rest of the beleaguered nation was denied to Mednipore. This might at first be attributed to an apathetic administration, or an administration preoccupied with war at its doorstep. But circumspect reasoning cannot, but come to the inevitable conclusion that this carnage, and indeed it was carnage was well orchestrated and pre meditated. The District Collectorate COULD have issued storm warnings. It did not not. The administration COULD have rushed food and medical supplies immediately in the aftermath of the cyclone. It did not. The work of Nobel Laurate Amartya Sen has proved that overall shortages of rice production were not enough to cause such widespread famine.
Year Rice production for Mednipore
(in million of tons)
1938 8.474
1939 7.922
1940 8.223
1941 6.768
1942 9.296
1943 7.628
Prof. Sen argues that hoarding of food, caused in part by actual shortages, and in part by the very real shortage (which was, however, localized, and could have been easily reversed by imports from other states) and a rising black market lead to rice simply being priced out of the reach of the common man.
The British Raj created this artificial famine. The British presided over the slow death by starvation and disease of approximately five million Bengalis. They were responsible for the murder of these people. This was genocide. It cannot be termed anything else by apologists or others. Hitler’s score in six years was some six million Jews. Churchill’s score was only marginally less: five million Bengalis.
Note: I started writing this article after a conversation with my father regarding the way things worked out during the war. This essay follows very closely an earlier article written by Padmabhushan Prof. Tapan Roy Choudhury (Professor Emeritus of Indian History and Civilization in the University of Oxford) which appeared in the Calcutta Statesman in late 2005.
Online Readings:
1.http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/timeline/factfiles/nonflash/a1138673.shtml?sectionId=4&articleId=1138673
2.http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/timeline/factfiles/nonflash/a1138673.shtml?sectionId=4&articleId=1138673
3.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
4.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_05B_(1999)#Impact
5.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defence_of_India_Act
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