Assassin 2.0
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Hey 21st century slave don't even try to spread BS on this subject if you don't know how much pain that MAN MADE DISASTER HURT INDIAN'S.
If you can't accept that i can also unzip ky pant and piss on all of your allied forces idiots which died in that war.
I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits." -Winston Churchill
The British had a ruthless economic agenda when it came to operating in India and that did not include empathy for native citizens. Under the British Raj, India suffered countless famines. But the worst hit was Bengal. The first of these was in 1770, followed by severe ones in 1783, 1866, 1873, 1892, 1897 and lastly 1943-44. Previously, when famines had hit the country, indigenous rulers were quick with useful responses to avert major disasters. After the advent of British rule, most of the famines were a consequence of monsoonal delays along with the exploitation of the country’s natural resources by the British for their own financial gain. Yet they did little to acknowledge the havoc these actions wrought. If anything, they were irritated at the inconveniences in taxation the famines brought about.
A lot has been written about the devastating Bengal famine of 1943 that wiped out 3.7 million (many put the figure even higher) people from the face of this earth. Many accounts of the famine also contain elaborate evidence of the criminal complicity of Winston Churchill in not just creating the famine, but also letting the millions die because he, a racist and white supremacist, hated them. However, it is never ever enough to retell the terrible, British-made tragedy that befell Bengal, not at least till Churchill’s successors—and they continue to enjoy the wealth created out of the loot of India by the British—apologise for that horrendous crime against humanity and pay reparations for it.
The British, say historians, had banned farmers in large parts of India from growing paddy and wheat, ordering them to grow indigo and opium instead, which could be exported and would earn huge sums for the British treasury. Thus, production of foodgrains declined substantially in India, and there were no buffer stocks when paddy crops in Bengal failed. Also, thanks to British policies and over-taxation, farmers sunk deep in debt and had to sell off their lands to bigger landlords (jotedars). The British encouraged the rich landlords to exploit the poor and landless in order to maximise their profits.
Fearing a Japanese advance into British India from the eastern part of Bengal, the British implemented the ‘scorched-earth’ policy to deny the advancing Japanese troops access to food and transport. Thus, rice stocks in the eastern part of Bengal were confiscated and destroyed, leaving people to starve. The British also confiscated all boats—more than 46,000 of them—thus crippling movement of food and people. Paddy could not be taken to markets and food could not be distributed. Farmers, traders, fishermen, and boatmen were thus reduced to penury, and the complete halt in movement of food led to hunger and starvation. The British administration made no effort to address the crisis faced by local people.
To exacerbate the already worsening food crisis in Bengal, other provinces started banning food exports outside their territories fearing a rise in food prices due to the rise in demand for food from Bengal. The British administrators in Delhi did nothing to discourage and remove such bans. And even as the first signs of famine emerged in mid-1942, the British administration started preferential distribution of goods and services to workers in essential war industries. Rice was diverted from the starving rural poor to feed private and government wartime industries, military and civilian construction, paper and textile mills, engineering firms, the railways, coal mining, and government workers at various levels. Similarly, medicines and state as well as private medical care were prioritised for troops and those connected with the war effort, leaving the hungry and ailing masses to die like flies.
Many historians also cite the events leading up to the Quit India Movement, and this movement itself, as contributing factors for the famine. In order to enlist the full cooperation of the Indians in the war, Churchill despatched a team under Stafford Cripps (the ‘Cripps Mission’) to negotiate a limited transfer of power after the war. The mission failed, and the Congress launched the Quit India movement. The British responded by jailing Congress leaders, and with no leadership to direct the movement, it soon became militant and resulted in large-scale sabotage of factories, bridges, telegraph, and railway lines, thereby threatening Britain’s war enterprise. This is said to have led to a hardening of British attitude towards Indians and made an already hateful Churchill more apathetic to the plight of the starving millions in Bengal.
Between late 1942 and early 1943, Viceroy Linlithgow, Bengal Governor John Herbert, commander-in-chief of British forces in India General Auchinleck, and even the supreme commander of British forces in South-East Asia Lord Louis Mountbatten began requesting London for food imports to Bengal. But the British war cabinet under Churchill continuously turned down those requests and, instead, asked for rice imports from Bengal to Ceylon be stepped up. The British war cabinet also declined offers of food relief from several countries, including the United States of America and Canada. Churchill directed food shipments from New Zealand and Australia to Ceylon, Middle East, South Africa, and Europe to augment the already-existing vast stocks of food there when he could have easily sent even a portion of them to Bengal. It was as if Churchill was hell-bent on pushing the starving millions of Bengal to certain death.
Starvation and malnutrition combined with the unchecked spread of diseases like malaria, smallpox, and cholera due to denial of medical care and medicines to the civilians not connected with the war effort, thus leading to the millions of deaths. The famine also caused acute social distress—mass migration of people, dissolution and disintegration of millions of families, orphaned and widowed hundreds of thousands or children and women, and pushed tens of thousands and women and girls into prostitution.
Churchill’s apologists, some Britishers, and others argue that the famine was an unintended consequence of the war and that it was an unfortunate combination of natural disasters, crop failures, market failures, and the preoccupation of the British war cabinet with the war, due to which it could not pay adequate attention to providing relief to Bengal’s starving millions. What they forget is that the British were ruling over India by force at that time, and the prime responsibility for welfare of British subjects lay with Churchill, who did nothing to provide relief to Bengal when he could easily have. And it is not that the British civilians—who viewed even bread rationing an “intolerable deprivation”—themselves were anywhere near starving at any point during the war. Indians paid for their lives for the British war enterprise and Churchill, as the British premier, was responsible. The British caused the famine, and whether by their ineptness or by design is a matter for academic debate. But the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bengal famine is the apt time for the British to own up to the holocaust. And start paying reparations.
Postscript: British prime minister Tony Blair apologised for British complicity in the Irish potato famine of the 1840s that cost a million Irish lives.
I can also post sentiment photos. ****** here keep barking shit like a idiot.
