Dear Sayantani Gupta: Those are valid points. On the first, please read Abijit Sarkar’s “The Effects of Race and Caste on Relief in the Bengal Famine.” An abstract with links is on the Hillsdale College Churchill Project website.
I referred your comments to Dr. Tirthankar Roy, who has also written on these matters. He writes:

Suhrawardy was directly responsible for food procurement and supply in famine-hit Bengal. He was the most powerful member of the Cabinet in the elected Bengal government. In principle, he could influence the federal administration to negotiate food supplies from the rest of India. He not only did not do that until very late; he consistently denied that there was a famine in Bengal, against the advice and insistence of senior bureaucrats serving under him. I read a semi-autobiographical piece by one of these officers and Suhrawardy’s arrogance makes for disturbing reading.

We do not know why he followed this line. The person who made the comment suggests a “communal slant.” Suhrawardy did advocate the creation of an East Pakistan, and practiced communal politics, as many Hindus and Muslims did in the 1940s. Part of this politics was the claim that the Hindu merchants were hoarding grain and the poor Muslim peasants and workers suffered starvation. Suhrawardy said that, but we do not know if he really believed it. When raids on grain stocks were made, little was discovered. Another explanation is that he saw himself as an ally of the British-run federal government, whose main commitment was the war, not welfare of the Bengalis. He did actively help in the war effort, but later got into quarrels with the federal government, blaming it for the famine and being blamed in turn for corruption.

What is absolutely clear through all this is that Winston Churchill had little direct responsibility in the matter of food supplies to Bengal, and those who did have that responsibility escaped a serious scrutiny in the current sensationalist writings about the famine – led by Madhusree Mukherjee’s book. [Reviewed by Arthur Herman here.]

I also forwarded your note to Dr. Zareer Masani who agrees and writes: “It might be worth adding that Hindu merchants were equally blamed for hoarding and speculation and for withholding supplies out of Congress sympathies. Reports to Churchill would have been via Delhi Viceroy, not Bengal governor.”

There are no “apologists” referenced here, rather scholars interested in the truth. No one should presume they have no family experience of the tragedy because many of them are Indian. (2) Even in the British Raj, provinces were ruled by elected local governments formed by democratic process. Unfortunately, rivalries and conflict existed, as Dr. Tirthankar Roy writes: The Minister of Civil Supplies, Hussein Suhrawardy, was “an aggressive campaigner for the no-shortage theory,” which his government conveyed to London. The economist Amartya Sen argued that the famine was exacerbated by Bengali government’s inaccurate claims of adequacy more than a bad harvest. Other scholars, like Omkar Goswani and Mufakharul Islam, countered that the harvest was a greater factor. Dr. Roy adds that the Bengal government also failed to send food “to the region internally, where there was no famine. The real question is why this didn’t happen, rather than what Churchill did.”

(3) The Secretary of State for India wisely saw the shortages building and requested food assistance because it was his job. (4) In wartime, all media was censored. Those who blithely suggest that governments who failed the people should have done better seem to forget that there was a world war on. As Churchill said, wars are “mainly a catalogue of blunders” and “tales of muddle.”

(5) Churchill’s appeal to America was among his last actions to relieve the shortage, In October 1942 Churchill told the new Viceroy: “The hard pressures of world-war have for the first time for many years brought conditions of scarcity, verging in some localities into actual famine, upon India. Every effort must be made, even by the diversion of shipping urgently needed for war purposes, to deal with local shortages.”

Churchill then added: “Every effort should be made by you to assuage the strife between the Hindus and Moslems and to induce them to work together for the common good. No form of democratic Government can flourish in India while so many millions are by their birth excluded from those fundamental rights of equality between man and man, upon which all healthy human societies must stand.” Does that sound like a racist committing deliberate maleficence?

(6) Tirthankar Roy (Paradox of the Raj) notes that famines, common in the 19th century, were unknown in the 20th up to 1943. Reasons included the 1880 Famine Commission collecting data on weather and crops and issuing timely warnings; the census and registers of vital statistics; and improved rail transport and infrastructure. All these improvements were installed by British and Indians alike.

It might be well to read the works of Dr. Roy, Omkar Goswani, Hussein Suhrawardy and Mufakharul Islam and get a proper grip on a tragedy whose causes are still debated today. Also kindly read Zareer Masani, biographer of Indira Gandhi: “Churchill a War Criminal? Get Your History Right.”

None of these gentlemen were or are whites, let alone supremacists. Of course it’s harder to read a book than to retread a Tweet.

Arthur Herman writes: “Yet in peacetime, the Raj always handled famines with efficiency.” Of course the British Famine Codes led to the Raj building up a comprehensive relief infrastructure, never seen before. As Dr Roy says in his book: “First, the open economy that the regime sponsored delivered two extraordinary benefits to the Indians: it stimulated business and reduced deaths from diseases and famines.” Before the Raj, India was a land ravaged with famine, and relief was at best palliative.

Gandhi’s view was surprising to say the least. Thank you for that. I wholeheartedly agree with WSC, a shame people didn’t listen.

Such a claim is not mentioned in documents of Cabinet discussions on the famine. Nor are there any requests for aid from Congress leaders. Gandhi himself took a remarkably detached view of the tragedy. From Arthur Herman’s review of the book Churchill’s Secret War:

The issue barely comes up in [Gandhi’s] letters, except as another grievance against the Raj. Yet in peacetime, the Raj always handled famines with efficiency. In February 1944 Gandhi wrote to Wavell: “I know that millions outside are starving for want of food. But I should feel utterly helpless if I went out and missed the food [i.e. independence] by which alone living becomes worthwhile.”

Churchill was always reluctant to deal with or trust Congress as the sole representative of the Indian people. Coincidentally, in researching Churchill’s views on the Armenian genocide, I came across this speech on India in the Commons on 12 September 1946 (Complete Speeches, VII, 7412-13):

The second point to which I would like to draw the attention of the House is the cardinal error of His Majesty’s Government when, on 12 August, they invited one single Indian party, the Congress Party, having made other efforts, to nominate all the members of the Viceroy’s Council. Thereby they precipitated a series of massacres over wide regions, unparalleled in India since the Indian Mutiny of 1857…. What happened in Bihar casts into the shade the Armenian atrocities with which Mr. Gladstone once stirred the moral sense of Liberal Britain. We are, of course, cauterised by all that we ourselves have passed through. Our faculty for wonder is ruptured, our faculty for horror is numbed; the world is full of misery and hatred.

Churchill’s Secret War (2010) lays the blame at the door of London. It says that Winston Churchill held racist views about Indians which prevented Britain from supplying enough relief to Bengal in time. As political history, the argument is naive. There is little evidence that Churchill’s personal views about Indians influenced the policies of the War Cabinet.

With Japan’s entry into the war and the fall of Singapore in February 1942, the British Empire’s resources were a critical asset for Britain to fight a war that stretched from Europe to North Africa to Asia. A potential obstacle to using this resource was the local nationalist movement.

The context for almost everything [Churchill] said about Indians and the Empire was related to the Indian nationalist movement. Negotiating with the Indian nationalists during the war could be pointless and dangerous because the moderate nationalists were demoralized by dissension and the radical nationalists wanted the Axis Powers to win on the Eastern Front. Racist or not, no Prime Minister would be willing to fight a war and negotiate with the nationalists at the same time. What has any of that to do with the famine? Very little.

The War Cabinet did not divert enough ships from the theatres of war to Bengal or order India to divert army rations to feeding people because the Cabinet believed what the Bengalis told it: there was no shortage of food in Bengal. The Cabinet took decisions in the knowledge that the axis powers were sinking one ship every day and had sunk around a million tons of shipping in 1942.

The regions where rice might be available were the most dangerous waters to enter. Army rations were already reduced. Further cuts could risk a mutiny.

Finally we have another scholar, this time an expert (who researches this area and whose books are standard works) who bluntly states the truth and doesn’t mince words.

At least this one doesn’t directly accuse him of genocide.

Although the writer is at pains to emphasize that Sir Winston (b.1874) was a racist which clearly shows his agenda, by his standard even Gandhi should be condemned for his racism.

Please read the article and point out the lies spewed by this author. (As someone who doesn’t support Brexit, I admit that it is the Remainers who are obsessed about with Empire 2.0—and Empire in general).

The writer engages in counterfactuals with regard to the unification of India and heavily downplays British achievements, which even Indian nationalists at the time lauded.