workingclasshistory:

On this day, 22 August 1943, The Statesman magazine published this photograph of starving people during the Bengal famine in British colonial India. The governor of Bengal had ordered rice across much of Bengal to be removed or destroyed in 1942 to prevent it getting into enemy hands, and they confiscated 46,000 boats from local people, devastating the fishing industry. Authorities then began diverting food from rural areas, where there were already shortages, to people deemed a “priority”, namely wealthier and better educated people, and those working in war industries and the civil service. Flooding damaged farmland, putting food supplies at risk, however Winston Churchill’s government did not act on these warnings. And when the famine began, instead of providing relief, the government forbade the colony from using its own financial reserves or ships to import food, and instead continued to export thousands of tonnes of rice for Europeans, and put excess food from elsewhere in the British Empire into storage. In all, 2 to 4 million people died, in what most historians consider an entirely man-made famine. India had previously suffered much bigger reductions in food supply without mass deaths, for example in 1873-4. But Winston Churchill was a white supremacist and an anti-Semite, who cared nothing for the local population. He believed that “the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis is less serious than that of sturdy Greeks”, and during the famine he proudly exclaimed “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
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