March 13, 2015
The Toledo Blade

The Little-known Dark Side of Winston Churchill

Asians know his policies led to starvation of 3 million Indians

by S. Amjad Hussain

. . . Enough time has passed since his death in 1965 to reassess Mr. Churchill's legacy. For the people of South Asia, he was not a hero. He was a racist who was responsible for the death by starvation of 3 million Indians. His actions constituted a crime against humanity.

Those people died of a preventable famine in Bengal and other parts of India. Mr. Churchill ordered vital food supplies and medical aid to be sent from India to already well-supplied soldiers in Europe. The British also carried out a scorched-earth policy along the India-Burma border in the hope that Japan would not invade India from Burma.

Some British administrators in India objected to the policies dictated by London. But they were rebuffed. Mr. Churchill's response to the Bengal famine was: Famine or no famine, "Indians will breed like rabbits".

When the British viceroy in India sent a telegram to Mr. Churchill detailing the devastation and the number of people who had died of hunger, the prime minister asked: "Then why hasn't Gandhi died yet?" . . .

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Definition of holocaust
1 : a sacrifice (see SACRIFICE entry 1 sense 2) consumed by fire
2 : a thorough destruction involving extensive loss of life especially through fire
a nuclear holocaust
3a usually the Holocaust : the mass slaughter of European civilians and especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II
Several members of her family died in the Holocaust.
a Holocaust survivor
b : a mass slaughter of people
especially : GENOCIDE
a holocaust in Rwanda

Bengal famine of 1943, Wikipedia

Enver Masud, "Holocaust Remembrance Veils Criminal Policies," The Wisdom Fund, April 22, 2001

Gideon Polya, "The Forgotten Holocaust - The 1943/44 Bengal Famine," globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com, July 11, 2005

[The worst massacre carried out by the British is not even acknowledged as such, but was instead celebrated as an heroic epic with no less than eight Victoria Crosses being awarded to the participants. This was the storming of the Sikander Bagh, a walled garden, during the second relief of Lucknow. There were over 2,000 rebels in the enclosure and they were attacked by troops from the 93rd Highlanders and the 4th Punjab infantry. According to the future Field Marshall Lord Roberts . . .

"inch by inch they were forced back to the pavilion, and into the the space between it and the north wall where they were all shot or bayoneted. There they lay in a heap as high as my head, a heaving mass of dead and dying inextricably entangled."--John Newsinger, "The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire," theguardian.com, Bookmarks (September 7, 2006), p.79]

[This Bengal Holocaust became a Forgotten Holocaust . . . Yet it was to the WW2 Bengal Famine that the word "Holocaust" was first applied--Gideon Polya, "UK, US And Israeli State Terrorism And Western Holocaust Denial," Countercurrents.org, December 21, 2006]

AUDIO: "The Bengal Famine," BBC Radio 4, January 7, 2008

Tom Hayden, "The 10 greatest controversies of Winston Churchill's career," bbc.com, January 28, 2015

Colin Todhunter, "India and the Globalization of Servitude," counterpunch.org, April 7, 2015

[What about the Brits and their famines, which they were using as population control and intimidation tactics in India! In Bengal at least 5 million died in 1943 alone, 5.5 million in 1876-78, 5 million in 1896-97, to name just a few terrorist acts committed by the British Empire against a defenseless population forced to live under its horrid and oppressive terrorist regime!--Andre Vltchek, "How the West Creates Terrorism," counterpunch.org, January 22, 2016]

"British Reduced India From the Richest to the Poorest Country in World," counterpunch.org, December 22, 2016

["Britain came to one of the richest countries in the world in the 18th century and reduced it, after two centuries of plunder, to one of the poorest." . . .

Between 12 and 29 million Indians died of starvation while it was under the control of the British Empire, as millions of tons of wheat were exported to Britain as famine raged in India.--"5 of the worst atrocities carried out by British Empire claims," independent.co.uk, March 5, 2017]

[All this made India (which included the future state of Pakistan) the largest Allied creditor after the US. Britain owed her £1.335 billion ($5.23 billion, which is about $59 billion today). . . .

Britain is said to have secretly sounded out the US, and received a discreet assurance that she could avoid repaying India, Pakistan, Egypt and others their wartime debt in convertible currency.--Kannan Srinivasan, "How India Paid to Create the London of Today," thewire.in, April 20, 2017]

[The Victorian era was responsible for unimaginable atrocities in India. Indian MP Shashi Tharoor, author of Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India, demonstrates how Britain economised its industrial revolution through plundering India, reducing the country's share of the world economy from 23 percent to 4 percent.

British exploitations of India - like that of local produce, such as grain - led to unprecedented poverty under the British Raj; both the Great Famine of 1876-1878 and the Indian famine of 1899-1900 are thought to have killed up to 10 million people each.

And let's not forget the direct killing sprees of indigenous civilians. Take, for instance, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1921, in which non-violent Indian protesters were fired at by the British Indian Army (over 1,000 dead, and many more thousands wounded).--Kannan Srinivasan, "Victoria and Abdul is another dangerous example of British filmmakers whitewashing colonialism," independent.co.uk, September 16, 2017]

Pankaj Mishra, "How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war," theguardian.com, November 10, 2017

[Historian William Dalrymple, author of The Anarchy, a new book on the East India Company, says it "ferried opium to China, fighting the opium wars in order to seize an offshore base at Hong Kong and safeguard its profitable monopoly in narcotics".--Soutik Biswas, "How Britain's opium trade impoverished Indians," bbc.com, September 5, 2019]

Galloway: Palestinians 'paid biggest price' for Holocaust, RT America, January 23, 2020

[Irving's books sold millions of copies, . . . But he fell foul of Zionists, . . . He documented a holocaust of a sort, but it is a different one than the Zionists prefer.--Paul Craig Roberts, "Churchill's War: The Real History of World War II," paulcraigroberts.org, April 19, 2020]

David Swanson, "WWII Was Not Fought To Save Anyone From Death Camps," antiwar.com, September 25, 2020

[According to Tharoor, 35 million people died under the British Raj from unnecessary famines caused by British policy--Rishikesh Kumar, "75 Years of Independence: How India Fought for Freedom From The British Raj," sputniknews.com, August 15, 2022]