Famine in Bengal, 1943
The 1943 famine in Bengal ( Bengali পঞ্চাশের মন্বন্তর ) affected the Bengal presidency in what was then British India during the Second World War . The number of deaths from starvation is estimated at 1.5 to 4 million. The famine is considered to be the greatest humanitarian catastrophe in British India and in the entire British Empire of the 20th century.
causes
The policy of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is said to have a crucial responsibility. Various factors also exacerbated the famine. On the one hand, there was a drought. On the other hand, after the fall of Singapore, the British crown colony of Burma was conquered by the Japanese in March 1942 , so that the rice imports, with which Bengal had been partially supplied during peacetime, were no longer available.
Role of the British Empire
Many modern Indian and Bengali journalists and historians have accused the then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill , in particular, of having shown himself indifferent to the misery in Bengal or even knowingly accepted it. During the famine it was Churchill's only interest to ensure the good supplies of the British-Indian army and the British motherland . His only answer to a telegram from Viceroy Archibald Wavell asking for food stores to be released was the question of why Gandhi had n't also starved to death. Churchill expressed his disdain for the Indians to Leopold Stennett Amery , the Secretary of State for India : "I hate Indians, [...] they are an animal people with an animal religion." ( "I hate Indians [...] They are a beastly people with a beastly religion " ). The famine is their own fault and a consequence of the fact that they “breed like rabbits” .
Supplies in other provinces of British India were partly not or only hesitantly delivered to Bengal for selfish reasons. The war situation also hindered the free transport of food to Bengal. Offers of assistance for food deliveries from the United States were turned down. During the famine, freighters from Australia loaded with grain drove past the Indian coast in the direction of Europe to refill the food stores in mainland Britain, which are filled with millions of tons. Food was continuously exported from India, among other things with the argument that this would guarantee supplies to the newly opened theater of war in Greece and Italy . State Secretary Amery noted in his diary: "Winston may be right that the starvation of already undernourished Bengals is less important than that of robust Greeks, but he pays too little heed to the idea that the Empire has a responsibility to this country" ( "Winston may be right in saying that the starvation of anyhow under-fed Bengalis is less serious than sturdy Greeks, but he makes no sufficient allowance for the sense of Empire responsibility in this country" ).
review
The later first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru wrote in 1946:
“The famine could have been avoided, given proper handling of the food situation in the earlier years of the war. […] The tragedy of Bengal and the famines in Orissa, Malabar and other places are the final judgment on British rule in India. The British will certainly leave India and their Indian Empire will become a memory, but what will they leave when they have to go, what human degradation and accumulated sorrow? "
“The famine could have been avoided if adequate food supply planning had been done in the early years of the war. [...] The tragedy of Bengal and the famines in Orissa , Malabar and other places form the final verdict on British rule over India. The British will certainly leave India and their Indian empire will be history, but what will they leave behind when they have to go, how much human humiliation and accumulated suffering? "
Web links
- Bengal famine of 1943 - A Photographic History Part 1 , Part 2 , Historical photographs of the event on oldindianphotos.in (English)
- 1943 Bengal Famine , short eyewitness report at BBC Witness (April 1, 2015, English)
literature
Cormac Ó Gráda: Eating People Is Wrong, and Other Essays on Famine, Its Past, and Its Future. Princeton University, Princeton 2015, ISBN 978-0-691-16535-6 , pp. 38-91.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Estimates from: Encyclopedia Britannica , 1992
- ↑ Amartya Sen (1981): Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. London: Oxford University Press. P. 203, ISBN 9780195649543 .
- ↑ a b Joseph Lazzaro: Bengal Famine Of 1943 - A Man-Made Holocaust. International Business Times, February 22, 2013, accessed October 14, 2014 .
- ↑ Rakesh Krishnan Simha: Remembering India's forgotten holocaust: British policies killed nearly 4 million Indians in the 1943-44 Bengal Famine. (No longer available online.) Tehelka.com, June 13, 2014, archived from the original on April 11, 2015 ; accessed on April 5, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Shashi Tharoor: The Ugly Briton. Time Magazine, November 29, 2010, accessed April 5, 2015 (Review of Madhusree Mukerjee 's book: Churchill's Secret War ).
- ↑ http://histclo.com/essay/war/ww2/cou/india/w2i-fam.html
- ↑ Soutik Biswas: How Churchill 'starved' India. BBC News, October 28, 2010, accessed April 5, 2015 .
- ^ Jawaharlal Nehru: The Discovery of India. (pdf) Retrieved April 6, 2015 (digitized full text, p. 499).
