THE DELIBERATE MISCALCULATION
60 million lives were lost in the Second World War. Does it include the 5 million dead of Bengal in 1943 due to Churchill-enforced starvation by induced famine? Will the Britishers re-count now and arrive at the correct death-toll of World War II?
The Jewish Holocaust victims numbered 6 million and they are a part of the count of the dead for the Jews had been annihilated by the Germans who lost the war. But the Bengalees who had been deprived of food and starved to death, those 5 million died at the hands of the victorious British. Hence, they do not form a part of the count.
The Jews have never rested to make their voices heard. Their constant study, research and submissions in international fora about their annihilation in Nazi concentration camps have never let the world forget for a day the horrors they experienced and survived through to emerge the nation they today are. This constant affirmation has created for them an identity which they have clung onto in their nation-building. The German Government post World War II has had to not merely apologise to Israel and Poland for the Nazi atrocities perpetrated in Treblinka, Auschwitz and Sobibor but it has radically transformed German policy-making in the post war scenario.
On the contrary, the Bengalees have been loathe to broach the issue of the Bengal Holocaust of 1943 by deliberate British policy. In a year of plentiful production of crops when famine was not even a distant possibility, 5 million Bengalees died just of it. Crops by the cartloads were shipped by the British under Churchill's orders to Europe to provide buffer stock for the soldiers and war-time provisions for the population of England. That the Bengalees paid for such British future provisions with their lives, 5 million of them, mattered least. After all the natives were hardly fit to be called civilised human beings, so it was in the fitness of things that they should perish to let the superior Anglo-Saxons live !
Even Stalin starved 7 million Ukrainians to death to suppress the agrarian revolt there, that of the Kulaks, sealing off Ukraine's borders to prevent a fly from migrating to safe terrain. Mao's Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, cost tens of millions of lives. 100 million Hindus lost their lives over a thousand year period of Islamic tyrannical reign in India which is today dubbed the Hindu Holocaust. But these are beyond the purview of the discussion here for they are unrelated to the Second World War.
The point pertinent here is that the world is largely unaware of this British barbarism. A more shameful thing is that even most modern Bengalees are unaware of this terrible catastrophe that shook Bengal in 1943 and reduced a nation to ruins. There aren't bodies which will take up the cause and uphold it before the world to break the myth of Churchill's heroic stature as a statesman. The evil that he represented which was so symptomatic of the colonial Raj itself must be brought to international focus and the British exposed for their perpetration of barbarism in India. But, alas, Bengal sleeps on this issue even as she raises revolution over coffee cups !
This is in sharp contrast to the Jewish race which has made the Holocaust their national rallying point. Their single-minded pursuit of the narrative has exposed German atrocity like nothing else has done and maligned Nazism as the handiwork of the Devil. Einstein, post his self-exile, refused to visit Germany ever again, 'the land of mass murderers' as he dubbed it. He never forgave the Germans for what his own people suffered at their hands.
This is called patriotism. When will we, Bengalees, who revel in everything English and who love to settle in England which was built out of our blood and toil, our resources and reserves, our sacrifices and sufferings, our torment and torture, learn to return the Jewish compliment and rise up to recast our own historical narrative? Would not that be the real obeisance to our forefathers, the true 'tarpan'? To expect the British to expose themselves on this diabolical deed of that other Devil, Winston Churchill, and with it to open up the Pandora's Box of British colonial corruption down the centuries in India will be to fantasise too much in the great myth of British fairplay. Hence, initiatives must begin from home if ever the world is going 'to lend its ears' to this human tragedy of monstrous proportions enacted in the heart of British Bengal in 1943.
The only Bengalee that capably reacted was Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. He sent by first consignment a shipload of Burmese grains to feed Bengal but the British authorities refused entry into the port to the ship carrying the relief material. The ship, laden with food grains, returned to Burma while Bengal starved to death. A much much smaller quantity of Burmese rice was sent by Swami Ranganathananda of the Ramakrishna Mission from Rangoon and it was accepted by the British. Why so? Because he was on the right side of the wartime political spectrum so far as Britain was concerned. Netaji was after all a Japanese ally and, hence, an enemy whose help could not be accepted. But why so? Because it was the determined programme of the British to kill revolutionary resistance in Bengal by debilitating the population through starvation. Bengal must die if Britain is to rule over India ! This, perhaps, was the dastardly dictum of the British.
Israel has risen from the Holocaust to self-respect and self-preservation. When will Bengal rise to such self-esteem and eminence?
Written by Sugata Bose
60 million lives were lost in the Second World War. Does it include the 5 million dead of Bengal in 1943 due to Churchill-enforced starvation by induced famine? Will the Britishers re-count now and arrive at the correct death-toll of World War II?
The Jewish Holocaust victims numbered 6 million and they are a part of the count of the dead for the Jews had been annihilated by the Germans who lost the war. But the Bengalees who had been deprived of food and starved to death, those 5 million died at the hands of the victorious British. Hence, they do not form a part of the count.
The Jews have never rested to make their voices heard. Their constant study, research and submissions in international fora about their annihilation in Nazi concentration camps have never let the world forget for a day the horrors they experienced and survived through to emerge the nation they today are. This constant affirmation has created for them an identity which they have clung onto in their nation-building. The German Government post World War II has had to not merely apologise to Israel and Poland for the Nazi atrocities perpetrated in Treblinka, Auschwitz and Sobibor but it has radically transformed German policy-making in the post war scenario.
On the contrary, the Bengalees have been loathe to broach the issue of the Bengal Holocaust of 1943 by deliberate British policy. In a year of plentiful production of crops when famine was not even a distant possibility, 5 million Bengalees died just of it. Crops by the cartloads were shipped by the British under Churchill's orders to Europe to provide buffer stock for the soldiers and war-time provisions for the population of England. That the Bengalees paid for such British future provisions with their lives, 5 million of them, mattered least. After all the natives were hardly fit to be called civilised human beings, so it was in the fitness of things that they should perish to let the superior Anglo-Saxons live !
Even Stalin starved 7 million Ukrainians to death to suppress the agrarian revolt there, that of the Kulaks, sealing off Ukraine's borders to prevent a fly from migrating to safe terrain. Mao's Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, cost tens of millions of lives. 100 million Hindus lost their lives over a thousand year period of Islamic tyrannical reign in India which is today dubbed the Hindu Holocaust. But these are beyond the purview of the discussion here for they are unrelated to the Second World War.
The point pertinent here is that the world is largely unaware of this British barbarism. A more shameful thing is that even most modern Bengalees are unaware of this terrible catastrophe that shook Bengal in 1943 and reduced a nation to ruins. There aren't bodies which will take up the cause and uphold it before the world to break the myth of Churchill's heroic stature as a statesman. The evil that he represented which was so symptomatic of the colonial Raj itself must be brought to international focus and the British exposed for their perpetration of barbarism in India. But, alas, Bengal sleeps on this issue even as she raises revolution over coffee cups !
This is in sharp contrast to the Jewish race which has made the Holocaust their national rallying point. Their single-minded pursuit of the narrative has exposed German atrocity like nothing else has done and maligned Nazism as the handiwork of the Devil. Einstein, post his self-exile, refused to visit Germany ever again, 'the land of mass murderers' as he dubbed it. He never forgave the Germans for what his own people suffered at their hands.
This is called patriotism. When will we, Bengalees, who revel in everything English and who love to settle in England which was built out of our blood and toil, our resources and reserves, our sacrifices and sufferings, our torment and torture, learn to return the Jewish compliment and rise up to recast our own historical narrative? Would not that be the real obeisance to our forefathers, the true 'tarpan'? To expect the British to expose themselves on this diabolical deed of that other Devil, Winston Churchill, and with it to open up the Pandora's Box of British colonial corruption down the centuries in India will be to fantasise too much in the great myth of British fairplay. Hence, initiatives must begin from home if ever the world is going 'to lend its ears' to this human tragedy of monstrous proportions enacted in the heart of British Bengal in 1943.
The only Bengalee that capably reacted was Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. He sent by first consignment a shipload of Burmese grains to feed Bengal but the British authorities refused entry into the port to the ship carrying the relief material. The ship, laden with food grains, returned to Burma while Bengal starved to death. A much much smaller quantity of Burmese rice was sent by Swami Ranganathananda of the Ramakrishna Mission from Rangoon and it was accepted by the British. Why so? Because he was on the right side of the wartime political spectrum so far as Britain was concerned. Netaji was after all a Japanese ally and, hence, an enemy whose help could not be accepted. But why so? Because it was the determined programme of the British to kill revolutionary resistance in Bengal by debilitating the population through starvation. Bengal must die if Britain is to rule over India ! This, perhaps, was the dastardly dictum of the British.
Israel has risen from the Holocaust to self-respect and self-preservation. When will Bengal rise to such self-esteem and eminence?
Written by Sugata Bose
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