Columns | Opinion
The killing of three million Indians is a story waiting to be retold
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26 May, 2023
IN 1943, OVER three million people in Bengal died of starvation. Was Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill complicit in one of the most devastating famines in India’s recorded history?
The BBC and other Western media have tiptoed around the Great Bengal Famine of 1943. Madhusree Mukerjee’s book Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II laid bare the events that led to the tragedy.
Examining Mukerjee’s account is important now that Britain’s King Charles III has ordered an inquiry into the British royal family’s direct involvement in slavery and other imperial crimes.
Churchill regarded the Great Bengal Famine of 1943 as a local issue, a necessary collateral of war. Mukerjee is brutal in her findings. She writes: “Field Marshal Wavell observed in his diary on July 27, 1943, after witnessing an outburst in the War Cabinet. ‘Winston drew a harrowing picture of British workmen in rags struggling to pay rich Indian mill-owners; it became clear during the August 4 meeting on famine relief that the sterling debt was still embedded in the lion’s paw. Instead of sending relief, the War Cabinet recommended ‘forceful propaganda’ and curbs on inflation as measures against famin
