Friday, August 4, 2023

August 4, 1943. Famine in India.

Churchill and his cabinet decided not to ship British wheat to India, a decision which has been claimed to have resulted in the devastating Bengali famine of that year.

In actuality, the story is quite complicated, and the wheat request didn't have a 1 to 1 correlation with food supplies.  In the UK the request for wheat shipments was interpreted as an attempt to reduce grain inflationary prices and that a famine was ongoing was not appreciated.   The cause of the famine itself isn't particularly clear, as it was not associated with drought, which prior then recent Indian famines had been.  When the Indian Viceroy took action, belatedly, the famine was brought under control, but not before huge numbers of people had died.

Indeed, the Indian wheat harvest had been at a record level that year.

Claims that Churchill, who opposed Indian independence, was vicariously responsible for the famine didn't really come about until the 21st Century and to some extent reflect a post-colonial tendency, particularly in regard to India, to blame the British for every bad thing that occured during their imperial period.

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