After earning a very bad name when it comes to imposing
restrictions on people, the West Bengal government has finally buckled up and
readied a special police force to ensure that the full lockdowns on July 23,
July 25 and July 29 are abided by. The focus in on Kolkata — as the city is
seeing a huge spike in the number of the cases. According to news reports, 28 areas have been identified in the
city where special police teams comprising five police officers will be posted.
.. .. this is a post on Bengal but where Mamta has no relevance.
During my school
days, I was an avid reader of History in Text books reading many times and
remembering by heart the various Viceroys, the British rules, the good
governance, how good they were, and how freedom was obtained without ‘drop of
blood’ .. .. the books taught of the various good things that occurred during
the British rule, foremost among them
being Railways, Postal system – but not a single word on plundering, anarchy, divisive politics and the way millions were
made to die not to speak of those millions who fought for the British in
unknown territories not knowing who their enemies were !!
I read about
Cripps Mission led by Sir Richard Stafford Cripps, CH, QC, FRS, a British Labour Party politician, barrister,
and diplomat. A wealthy lawyer by background, he first entered Parliament at a
by-election in 1931, and was one of a handful of Labour frontbenchers to retain
his seat at the general election that autumn. He became a leading spokesman for
the left-wing and co-operation in a Popular Front with Communists before 1939,
in which year he was expelled from the Labour Party. During World War II, he served as Ambassador
to the USSR causing him to be seen in
1942 as a potential rival to Winston Churchill for the premiership. He became a
member of the War Cabinet of the wartime coalition.
May be as a
move to keep him away from British politics, he was sent to India heading a
Mission. The Cripps Mission
was a failed attempt in late March 1942 by the British government to secure
full Indian cooperation and support for their efforts in World War II. Cripps was sent to negotiate an agreement with
the nationalist Congress leaders, who spoke for the majority Indians and
Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, who spoke for the communalist Muslim
population. Cripps worked to keep India loyal to the British war effort in
exchange for a promise of elections and full self-government (Dominion status)
once the war was over. Cripps was a
friend of Nehru and did his utmost to arrange an agreement. In India, he also faced hostility from the
Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow. He began by offering India full dominion status at
the end of the war, with the Indian Defence
Ministry be reserved for the British.
The man who had sent him - Sir Winston
Leonard Spencer-Churchill (1874 – 1965) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from
1940 to 1945, when he led the country to victory in the Second World War, and
again from 1951 to 1955. Apart from two years between 1922 and 1924, Churchill
was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of
five constituencies. Of mixed English and
American parentage, Churchill was born in Oxfordshire to a wealthy,
aristocratic family.
Widely considered one of
the 20th century's most significant figures, Churchill remains popular in the
UK and Western world, where he is seen as a victorious wartime leader who
played an important role in defending Europe's liberal democracy from the
spread of fascism. Also praised as a social reformer and writer, among his many
awards was the Nobel Prize in Literature. Conversely, his imperialist views and
comments on race, as well as some wartime events like the 1945 bombing of
Dresden, have generated controversy. During the recent protests in
UK his statue was defaced. The Black
Lives Matter protester who 'tagged' the statue of Winston Churchill said he did
it because he believes Britain's greatest Prime Minister was a 'confirmed
racist' who cared more about colonialism than black people.
The Bengal
famine of 1943 was the only one in modern Indian history not to occur as a
result of serious drought, according to a study that provides scientific backing for
arguments that Churchill-era British policies were a significant factor
contributing to the catastrophe. The Guardian reported that
researchers in India and the US used weather data to simulate the amount of
moisture in the soil during six major famines in the subcontinent between 1873
and 1943. Soil moisture deficits, brought about by poor rainfall and high
temperatures, are a key indicator of drought.
Five of the famines were
correlated with significant soil moisture deficits. An 11% deficit measured
across much of north India in 1896-97, for example, coincided with food
shortages across the country that killed an estimated 5 million people.
However, the 1943 famine in Bengal, which killed up to 3 million people, was
different, according to the researchers. Though the eastern Indian region was
affected by drought for much of the 1940s, conditions were worst in 1941, years
before the most extreme stage of the famine, when newspapers began to publish
images of the dying on the streets of Kolkata, then named Calcutta, against the
wishes of the colonial British administration.
Food supplies to Bengal
were reduced in the years preceding 1943 by natural disasters, outbreaks of
infections in crops and the fall of Burma – now Myanmar – which was a major
source of rice imports, into Japanese hands. More recent studies, have
argued the famine was exacerbated by the decisions of Winston Churchill’s
wartime cabinet in London. It is documented that the cabinet was warned
repeatedly that the exhaustive use of Indian resources for the war effort could
result in famine, but it opted to continue exporting rice from India to
elsewhere in the empire. Rice stocks continued to leave India even as London was denying
urgent requests from India’s viceroy for more than 1m tonnes of emergency wheat
supplies in 1942-43. Churchill has been quoted as blaming the famine on the
fact Indians were “breeding like rabbits”, and asking how, if the shortages
were so bad, Mahatma Gandhi was still alive.
The Bengal famine of 1943 is
a dark chapter in the annals of Indiah history whence an estimated 2.1–3
million, out of a population of 60.3 million, died of starvation, malaria, or
other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary
conditions and lack of health care. Millions were impoverished as the crisis
overwhelmed large segments of the economy and catastrophically disrupted the
social fabric. Eventually, families disintegrated; men sold their small farms
and left home to look for work or to join the British Indian Army, and women
and children became homeless migrants, often travelling to Calcutta or other
large cities in search of organised relief.
The financing of military escalation led to war-time inflation, as land
was appropriated from thousands of peasants
Now read
this report too to understand the way still the British treat India ! - Historians
have criticised the BBC for an 'unbalanced' News At Ten report claiming
Churchill was responsible for the 'mass killing' of up to three million people
in the 1943 Bengal Famine. A section broadcast on Tuesday examined how modern
Indians view the wartime prime minster as part of a series on Britain's
colonial legacy, and featured a series of damning statements about his actions.
Rudrangshu Mukherjee of Ashoka University in India, said Churchill was seen as
a 'precipitator' of mass killing' due to his policies, while Oxford's Yasmin
Khan claimed he could be guilty of 'prioritising white lives over Asian lives'
by not sending relief. But today historians said the report ignored the complexities behind the famine in favour
of squarely blaming Churchill. World War Two expert James Holland argued he had
tried to help but faced a lack of resources due to the war against Japan.
The historian James
Holland weighed into the row today, insisting that Churchill faced immense
difficulties supplying Bengal due to the amount of British resources tied up in
the fight against the Japanese in the Pacific. 'In light of the latest furore
over the Bengal Famine and people wrongly still insisting it was Churchill's
fault, here's this on the subject,' he tweeted. 'His accusers don't a)
understand how the war worked, or b) that his hands were tied over use of
Allied shipping.'
Churchill's legacy has
been attacked in other quarters, with a group of civil servants recently
complaining that they did not feel 'comfortable' with having a room in the
Treasury named after him. The subject of
Churchill's racial attitudes and whether they taint his modern legacy has
become one of the most controversial areas of historical debate.
So for the
British Historians who could not however deny the fact that millions lost their
lives, it should be seen as Churchill
didn't cause the disaster but could not do much because of the circumstances ! ~ then why is he hailed as a great administrator ? Winston Churchill was at
the helm, down-playing the crisis and arguing against re-supplying Bengal to
preserve ships and food supplies for the war effort. Secretary of State for India at that time, Leopold Amery recorded that Churchill
suggested any aid sent would be insufficient because of 'Indians breeding like
rabbits'.
Sadly,
Indian History appears far different reading authentic sources and far away
from what was represented in School History books. One’s
heart would cry and melt to think that masses seen in the photo at the start were queuing in lines for porridge or rice
gruel.
With regards – S. Sampathkumar
23.7.2020.
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