By Amit Roy
THE BBC has defended its decision to carry a report which accused wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill of being a racist whose alleged refusal to send food to India aggravated the effects of the Bengal Famine of 1943 in which an estimated three million people died.
The highly personal report by Yogita Limaye, a BBC news correspondent in Mumbai, last Tuesday (21) was carried online, on the Today programme on Radio 4 and on News at Ten on BBC1.
In the Mail on Sunday, Tom Mangold, a former investigative journalist with the BBC, said: “I’ve just finished watching for the 10th time an outrageous piece of BBC TV news journalism that concluded that Winston Churchill, once voted Britain’s greatest statesman in a BBC poll, was a racist, responsible for the killing of thousands of Indians during the terrible famine of Bengal in 1943.
“The six-minute segment on News at Ten was biased, partial, unbalanced and filled with the spite and venom of the worst of toxic woke culture now pulsing through the heart of the corporation.
“Churchill was described in last Tuesday’s report as the ‘precipitator of the mass killing’ – that he personally made the situation much worse. One famine victim said: ‘The British government was killing us by starving us.’”
Mangold added: “There was a time when the BBC was the world’s most trustworthy news network. What on earth has happened? The BBC’s charter is unequivocal on its statutory commitment to impartiality, which it describes as ‘fundamental to our reputation’.
“Yet today that holy contract is well and truly broken. And so it is that News at Ten is allowed to use Huw Edwards’s authority and credibility – and the corporation’s reputation for truth – to call Churchill a racist killer.”
In the Daily Mail, historian Tom Sandbrook asked in the main edit page article: “Why should we be forced to pay for a BBC that portrays Winston Churchill as a mass murdering racist?”
It was pointed out that in June, Churchill’s statue in London’s Parliament Square was defaced with the word ‘racist’ by Black Lives Matter protestors.
“Has the BBC no sense of civic responsibility?” asked Sandbrook. “It’s only a few weeks since, humiliatingly, both the Cenotaph and Churchill’s Parliament Square statue had to be boxed up to protect them from screaming mobs. Is the BBC hoping to whip up a repeat performance?”
In response, the BBC said: “The item was the latest in a series looking at Britain’s colonial legacy worldwide.
“The series includes different perspectives from around the world, in this case from India, including a survivor from the Bengal famine, as well as Oxford historian Dr Yasmin Khan.
“The report also clearly explained Churchill’s actions in India in the context of his Second World War strategy.
“We believe these are all important perspectives to explore and we stand by our journalism.”
In the Today programme, author and Indian MP Shashi Tharoor, said: “Winston Churchill was one of the unjustifiably exalted figures of the 20th century, an odious figure of reprehensible views and racist attitudes, and whose long and shameful record deserves utmost condemnation today.”
Historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee was quoted as saying: “I am not in favour of pulling down or defacing statues. But I think in the plaque below the statues, the full history should be recorded – that Churchill was a hero in the Second World War, but that he was also responsible for the deaths of millions of people in Bengal in 1943. I think Britain owes that to Indians and to itself.”
In one of his comments on TV that outraged Sandbrook, he added: “In India he is seen actually as the precipitator of mass killing because of the policies that he advocated and because of the policies that he followed in Bengal in 1943.”
Madhusree Mukerjee, author of Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II, commented: “Churchill did several things that greatly aggravated the death toll.”
The eminent Bengali actor Soumitra Chatterjee, 85, who played Apu in the Satyajit Ray trilogy about life in rural Bengal, was eight when the famine hit. He told the BBC he could still remember its consequences: “People would cry pitifully, asking for the liquid that came out of cooking rice, because they knew nobody had any rice to give them. And anyone who has heard that cry will never forget it in their life. There are tears in my eyes now when I’m speaking about it. I can’t check my emotions.”
Sandbrook said there had been no one to give the other side of the story and speak up for Churchill: “Watching in disbelief, I wondered which historians the BBC had lined up to counter these arguments. Sir Max Hastings, one of our leading experts on Churchill and World War II? Andrew Roberts, whose recent biography of the great man won countless awards?
“The BBC’s message was clear. Churchill was a racist and a villain – and if you don’t agree, then so are you.”
The comment from Hastings, which was carried by the Express, was not entirely helpful to either side.
The military historian and former Daily Telegraph editor, said: “It is entirely true, and I have described it in my own books, that Churchill behaved badly during the Bengal Famine, and that is a blot on his record.
“But the BBC failed to include a voice to suggest that his services to Britain, and to mankind, were so great that they must rightfully be set in the balance against this failure. The BBC’s version was 2020 propaganda, not news or balanced history.”
The report by Limaye was, in some ways, more of an opinion piece rather than a straightforward news report.
She recalled growing up enjoying books by Enid Blyton, who had a character that kept a picture of Churchill on her mantelpiece because she “had a terrific admiration for this great statesman”.
So would she now throw out all her Blyton books?
“No,” said Limaye. “The happy memories they evoke are not tainted by what I now know. But I won’t pass them on to the children in my family. They deserve to read stories set in a more equal world.”
She said: “Seventy-three years since independence, a lot has changed. A new generation of Indians, more self-assured about our place in the world, are questioning why there isn’t more widespread knowledge and condemnation of the many dark chapters of our colonial history, like the Bengal famine of 1943.”
