Source: www.spiked-online.com
UK, November 19, 2010: Today, as Britain seeks to expand diplomatic links with India and as Churchill is championed as a hero of multiculturalism, Madhusree Mukerjee’s shocking account of the exploits of the Empire is well worth reading. His book “Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II” reminds Britain’s conduct in the Indian subcontinent, which has largely disappeared from memory – at least in Britain.
For example, during the struggle for independence a reasonably sympathetic report in the Daily Telegraph matter-of-factly declared that in India Winston Churchill “has been blamed for allowing more than a million people to die of starvation.”
Madhusree Mukerjee, writes with all the authority and clarity one might expect from someone who has served on the board of editors of Scientific American. Even for those who know a little of what happened in Calcutta and Bengal between 1939 and 1945, her chronicle has a true capacity to shock and enlighten.
“India was, next to Britain, the largest contributor to the Empire’s war”
Churchill’s racism toward Indians, especially Hindus, is no longer news, such has been the tide of revisionist thinking that began with the historian John Charmley’s 1993 book Churchill: The end of glory – A Political Biography. Nevertheless, the scale of British perfidy towards the 400 million people of India, and the scale of the famine that befell Bengal in 1943, are recounted by Mukerjee with such blistering coolness that one is left reeling. The fact that today, these things should be so badly forgotten, or treated as a surprising revelation, also gives pause for thought.
India’s job in the 1940s, as far as the British were concerned, was to ward off the Soviets from Afghanistan, to join in the defeat of the Germans in the Middle East and Africa, and, after Pearl Harbour, to join in the defeat of the Japanese. But there was another job Britain did, too: it removed India’s best troops from India, so that no nationalist mutiny there could be successful. Added to this, as Mukerjee makes clear, the colony’s entire output of timber, woollen textiles and leather goods, as well as three quarters of its steel and cement, were diverted to the defense of the British Empire. India was, next to Britain, the largest contributor to the Empire’s war.
Minutes from Britain’s War Cabinet in February 1940 record that Churchill regarded the ‘feud’ between Hindus and Muslims “as the bulwark of British rule in India.”
Estimates differ on how many died of famine in Bengal during and after 1943, not least because, as Mukherjee laconically observes, ‘deaths from malnutrition were undoubtedly occurring even in so-called normal years’. But three million is probably the best estimate. How did this happen?
Read more about this book here