Defending Churchill

By Amit Roy

THE author and MP Shashi Tharoor is among the Indians who allege Winston Churchill  was responsible for aggravating the ef­fects of the Bengal Fam­ine of 1943 in which up to four million people died. In fact, he said this during his now famous Oxford Union address.

This week, the case for the defence has been argued by another au­thor, Zareer Masani, in The Critic, “Britain’s new monthly magazine for politics, ideas, art, literature and more”.

Masani says: “A fa­vourite trope of the cur­rent Black Lives Mad­ness and its left-liberal white apologists has been the alleged infamy of Britain’s most cher­ished hero, Winston Churchill, charged with everything from mere racism to actual geno­cide. The worst accusa­tion is that of deliber­ately starving four mil­lion Bengalis to death in the famine of 1943.

“The famine took place at the height of World War Two, with the Japanese already occu­pying Burma and invad­ing the British Indian province of Bengal, bombing its capital, Cal­cutta, and patrolling its coast with submarines.”

He adds: “The actual evidence shows that Churchill believed, based on the informa­tion he had been get­ting, that there was no food supply shortage in Bengal, but a demand problem caused by local mismanagement of the distribution system.”

Zareer insists Church­ill’s abusive comments about Gandhi, Indians and Bengalis need to be seen in “context” and that he had a “penchant for making outrageous comments that he didn’t really mean”.

As they say in court reporting, “the trial continues”. A decision is not expected for anoth­er 100 years.