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www.tehelka.com...
The Bengal Famine of 1943-44 must rank as the greatest disaster in the subcontinent in the 20th century. Nearly 4 million Indians died because of an artificial famine created by the British government, and yet it gets little more than a passing mention in Indian history books.
Australian biochemist Dr Gideon Polya has called the Bengal Famine a “manmade holocaust” because Churchill’s policies were directly responsible for the disaster. Bengal had a bountiful harvest in 1942, but the British started diverting vast quantities of food grain from India to Britain, contributing to a massive food shortage in the areas comprising present-day West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Bangladesh.
Churchill could easily have prevented the famine. Even a few shipments of food grain would have helped, but the British prime minister adamantly turned down appeals from two successive Viceroys, his own Secretary of State for India and even the President of the US .
Churchill was totally remorseless in diverting food to the British troops and Greek civilians. To him, “the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis (was) less serious than sturdy Greeks”, a sentiment with which Secretary of State for India and Burma, Leopold Amery, concurred.
originally posted by: paraphi
1.This was a famine and not a holocaust.
2.It was not an attempt to cause death by the Indian Government. Rather it was the elected Indian-run provinces that obstructed aid and exacerbated the situation.
3.The figure of 4 million is the upper end of the range. Usually it’s quoted as 1 to 4 million who died of starvation and/or disease.
4.The famine was caused by multiple reasons and at the time there was a war on which constrained shipping in food as the Indian Government had done in the past.
originally posted by: maddy21
Read the second paragraph of the OP , it disproves all your points . And Indian govt. did not exist back then so stop using that term
originally posted by: maddy21
It was quiet clearly an engineered famine designed to cause the death of millions of people . The Cause of the famine has been clearly listed on the link and there are further observations made by eminent historians(link in OP) to suggest this was engineered famine which is pretty much an Holocaust
originally posted by: eletheia
originally posted by: maddy21
It was quiet clearly an engineered famine designed to cause the death of millions of people . The Cause of the famine has been clearly listed on the link and there are further observations made by eminent historians(link in OP) to suggest this was engineered famine which is pretty much an Holocaust
I don't believe it is possible to engineer weather conditions ... it is bad
weather conditions and the lack of rain which is responsible for poor harvests.
And not governments.
Those figures will be including disease and there is much disease.
Malaria is one of the largest killers in India, it is second only to TB
in its impact on world health. A large variety of internal parasitic
infections are endemic.
Although it will now be better than it was in the 1950's, access to
medical treatment was nil.
My ancestors first went to India in 1800, and were there till India
got its independence in 1947. India is vast with many states and as you will
see in the chart they all took their turns regarding famines.
Disasters happen all over the world (earth quakes, floods famines)
and other countries these days all rally round and help out but you
are blaming the British government when they were fighting a war, and
the British people themselves were suffering meagre rationing. Also at that
time there was very little air cargo travel was on ships and it was a two
week journey each way!
There were also during this time (around 1943/147) riots all over India
when the Hindu's and Muslims were fighting each other prior to partition
and the forming of Pakistan which didn't exist prior to 1947.
originally posted by: maddy21
Incorrect Before the British invasion there was literally no famine and if you go through additional sources and even in the link its clearly told that the harvest during those years were good.
originally posted by: maddy21
Incorrect Before the British invasion there was literally no famine and if you go through additional sources and even in the link its clearly told that the harvest during those years were good.
The 1942-43 Bengal Famine occurred in spite of a good harvest in Bengal and surplus grain stocks in other parts of India. The British exported the grain, pushing up prices and leaving the peasantry to starve. A British policy of destroying boats in case the Japanese invaded stopped villagers travelling to trade for food exacerbating things. The British lied about their policies claiming that grain was not being exported and massively downsizing the death toll, pretending that there was no famine. It was only when the British owned Statesman newspaper broke the silence that they had to acknowledge it and Lord Wavell was brought in to do something. He started bringing in surplus grain from other parts of India but this was, at first just piled up in the Botanical Gardens in Calcutta and not distributed to the starving. Indian protesters piled up dead bodies of refugees outside the gardens. Later the British tried to suppress the facts about this British-inflicted holocaust in India, occurring simultaneously with the German-inflicted genocide in Europe, as shown in the 1997 Channel 4 Secret History programme The Forgotten Famine. Indeed, this was not the first British-inflicted famine holocaust in British-ruled India. In 1901, The Lancet estimated conservatively that 19 million Indians had died in Western India during the drought famine of the 1890s. The death toll was so high because of the British policy of refusal to intervene and implement famine relief (unlike the anti-profiteering measures etc. taken by the Mughals and Marathas during famines) as detailed by American historian Mike Davis in his Late Victorian Holocausts. Similarly in the 1870s some 17 million or so Indians dies in the Deccan and South India due to the "let them starve" policies encouraged by Lord Lytton and other British rulers. Indeed, whilst millions starved in 1876, the British held the biggest feast in human history in Delhi, the Delhi Durbar to celebrate Victoria becoming Empress, feeding 70,000 Britishers and Indian princelings for a week. In 1901 when people called for famine relief, the London government urged Delhi to contribute to the Boer war instead of famine relief but had no objection to the huge expense of the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta.
originally posted by: paraphi
However, one could argue that it was one way to increase anti-British sentiment (blame the Brits) as a way to full independence was on the horizon. Another reason could have been the sectarian differences, which were so obvious when Independence resulted in Partition and the ensuing sectarian mayhem of Hindu versus Muslim. Bengal did have a reasonably high Muslim population. There's the conspiracy, that of Indian politics and British misreading of the said. That, rather than the British somehow manipulating a famine for a purpose unknown, in the middle of a war that put Japan in a position to invade India proper.
originally posted by: an0nThinker
a reply to: eletheia
Please substantiate your views with proof. I like that the British like to deny that they did anything wrong in India. Do you even know that there was a good harvest in Bengal in 42-43 and that all the food was exported, most of it rotted away. Aid was denied multiple times.