In 1943, Winston Churchill’s role in the Bengal famine was caused by his narcissistic need to fight against Nazi Germany by uniting his British forces and suppressing the basic rights of British occupied India. 

• Approximately 6 million Jewish people lose their lives during the Holocaust. 

• The Soviet Union bore an incredible brunt of casualties during WWII, with approximately 30 million who lost their lives. 

• Then we come to the death toll in India at the hands of the British.

• While 3 million alone died due to the Bengal famine, this is just one small percentage of total death during the British Raj of which Winston Churchill’s role was undeniably present. 

• An estimated 1.8 billion Indians lost their lives avoidably from egregious deprivation under the British Raj (1757-1947).

• “Famine or no famine, Indians will “breed like rabbits.” – Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill’s Role In The Bengal Famine: Britain’s Failure To Hide Their Holocaust 

Chapter 1 of Winston Churchill’s Role In The Bengal Famine: Racism

With western media shooting movies and documentaries about the greatness of Queen Elizabeth The Second’s mentor leading Britain into its finest hour, we don’t talk about Winston Churchill’s fight for raw white supremacism and a concentration camp network on a global scale, primarily in India. 

This shed’s light on what Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said about Churchill, “This is a man the British would have us hail as an apostle of freedom and democracy, when he has as much blood on his hands as some of the worst genocidal dictators of the 20th century.” 

Early Life of Racism and Savage Mentality:

Britain’s debatable national icon, Churchill, was born in 1874 into Britain when Victoria had just been crowned Empress of India, and the scramble for Africa was only a few years away. 

Educated at Harrow School and then Sandhurst, a young Churchill was brought up with a strong foundation that superior white men were born to conquer the primitive, dark-skinned natives, and bring them to the benefits of civilization. 

Historical documents would show that Churchill quickly charged off to take his part in “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples”. This ideology stuck with him until he died. 

Once the Swat valley, now part of Pakistan, Winston experienced, for a very very short period, a crack of doubt. 

Characteristically when he realized that the local population was fighting back because of “the presence of British troops in lands the local people considered their own,” he soon suppressed this thought, deciding instead they were merely deranged jihadists whose violence was explained by a “strong aboriginal propensity to kill”.

The former Prime Minister gladly took part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, destroying houses and burning crops in his youth. A couple of years later, he went to provide his assistance in the recapture of Sudan, where he bragged that he personally shot at least three “savages”.

Growing into an adult, Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn.

When concentration camps were built in South Africa, for white Boers, he said they conducted “the minimum of suffering”. Conflictingly, 28,000 lay dead and when at least 115,000 black Africans were also swept into British camps, where 14,000 died, he wrote of his “irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men”. 

Later, he bragged of his experiences there stating: “That was before war degenerated. It was great fun galloping about.”

Then as a Member of Parliament,  he demanded a rolling programme of more conquests, based on his belief that “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph”. 

Within some of his private letters are documented thoughts that truly believe people are helpless children who will “willingly, naturally, gratefully include themselves within the golden circle of an ancient crown”. Sounds like something out of Hitler’s page of thoughts. Likewise, when people defied, Churchill demanded they be crushed with extreme force. 

As Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, he came up with the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland’s Catholic civilians, and when the Kurds rebelled against British rule, he said: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes…[It] would spread a lively terror.”

Spreading Racism Globally:

He is the man who invented Iraq, locking together three conflicting tribes behind arbitrary borders that have been bleeding ever since. To gain support and power, the two-faced man is the Colonial Secretary who offered the Over-Promised Land to both the Jews and the Arabs – although he seems to have privately felt racist contempt for both. 

He looked with disdain at Palestinians calling them “barbaric hordes who ate little but camel dung”. 

At the Oval Office:

Google George W Bush standing with the bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House and you’ll see photos of the bust brightly lit. The ex-president attempted to associate himself with the war leader’s heroic stand against fascism. 

Barack Obama, on the other hand,  had it shipped back to Britain because he had first hand experience with the racist behaviour presented by Churchill: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama was taken to jail without trial for two years and was tortured on Churchill’s watch. He was physically tortured for resisting Churchill’s empire.

Chapter 2 of Winston Churchill’s Role In The Bengal Famine: Murder

Racial divide:

For those who are still alive today, convinced that Churchill wasn’t a monster, know that it was in fact Winston Churchill’s policies and not the drought that caused the famine, a group of Indian and American researchers found in a study published in the journal, Geophysical Research Letters. 

The researchers deduced by using weather data to simulate the amount of moisture present in the soil during six major Indian famines, (beginning just 15 years into Queen Victoria’s British Raj occupancy) in 1873-’74, 1876, 1877, 1896-’97, 1899 and 1943. The deficit of soil moisture is a key indicator of poor rainfall and high temperatures.

The research concluded that the first five famines were a result of drought, as concluded by the soil moisture study, but not the one that happened in 1943.

Clearly, Churchill was driven by a deep hatred of democracy for anyone other than the British. He believed in the idea of a supposedly superior race which was clearest in his attitude towards India. 

When Mahatma Gandhi launched his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill infamously mocked him by saying that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” 

As the resistance grew larger, he publicly stated: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” 

This hatred killed millions in 1943 as the famine broke out in Bengal on the backs of the imperial policies of the British. Up to 3 million people starved to death while British officials pleaded with Churchill to direct food supplies to Bengal. He bluntly refused his own race which speaks volumes about his disregard for his own kind, showing higher concern of how his country would remember his actions in the future. 

He raged that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits”. He also went public with the statement: the plague was “merrily” culling the population.

Famine:

Unsurprisingly, in 1943 Bengal famine was impossible to hide. The British Empire caused the famine by heavy exports of food from India.

The British policies believed that the heavy distribution of food and vital necessities was to be sent to their military during the second world war, halting import of rice, and the British government not declaring famine in India. As the famine got worse, 70,000 tons of rice were exported from India between January and July, 1943.

According to the study, another factor that exacerbated the mortality count of the 1943 famine was the Japanese capture of Burma (now Myanmar), which was a major source of rice imports in India. 

In 1981, Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said that supplies should have been in abundance during 1943 to control the deaths brought about by the famine

Speaking to CNN, Mishra, a professor said that during the 1873-’74 famine, the Bengal lieutenant governor, Richard Temple, saved many lives by importing and distributing food. But the British government criticised him and dropped his policies during the drought of 1943, leading to countless fatalities.

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Regardless of Churchill’s War Cabinet being warned about the famine at the time, the British Prime Minister was reluctant to devote time and resources to fix the Indian problem, and instead, strengthen his military operations and accumulate stocks at home.

“A concession to one country at once encourages demands from all the others,” Churchill commented in a memo on March 10, 1943. “They must learn to look after themselves as we have done. The grave situation of the UK import programme imperils the whole war effort and we cannot afford to send ships merely as a gesture of goodwill.”

After gaining independence, India’s population has increased but famine deaths have almost diminished. 

“Expansion of irrigation, better public distribution system, rural employment, and transportation reduced the impact of drought on the lives of people after independence,” Mishra, an associate professor of Indian Institute of Technology said. 

In conclusion, if you wouldn’t celebrate Hitler, why would you ever celebrate Winston Churchill? If you’d make movies about how great Hitler was in leading his country to the light, or make movies with leading actors delivering power Hitler speeches and revere Hitler just as you do Churchill, the obsession with Winston Churchill’s powerful career would come tumbling down just as Nazi Germany did.