The second major change was that the Princely states, that one third of India still governed by its hereditary rulers, were included in the constitution in much the same way as the British-administered provinces. The princes controlled one third of the seats in the Lower House in the Central Assembly and two fifths in the Upper House, effectively giving them a power bloc, which although it roughly corresponded with the size of their population was seen as disproportionate and unreasonable by a democratic Congress. They regarded it as the Raj trying to influence the shape of the future India as a conservative nation.
The Muslim League viewed the 1935 Act rather differently. They saw it as being the work of Congress and, although the federal principle was intended to allay Muslim fears, in fact it had the opposite effect. The League supposed that they might gain power in Sind, the North West Frontier Province, Punjab and Bengal, all provinces where Muslims constituted the largest electorate, but in the resulting elections, which took place in 1937, Congress swept the board. In five out of the eleven provinces they won a clear majority. In the North West Frontier Province their Muslim allies prevented the League from taking power; in Bengal there was a Muslim ministry but anti-League and in the Punjab, with its Muslim majority, a coalition government of various agricultural interests. Only in Sind and Assam in the far north-east was there a League ministry. It was the League’s reaction to these disappointments, and to Congress’ insistence that it spoke for all Indians regardless of religion, that was to energise Muhammad Ali Jinnah and eventually make the events of 1947 inevitable.
Despite Congress misgivings about working with the British, they set about forming ministries and started the work of provincial government. From 1937 to late 1939 was one of the more peaceful periods India had known in twenty years. Had world events taken a different course it is possible that the 1935 Act would have formed the basis, in time, for a more satisfactory handover of power but the declaration of war in 1939 was to prove as decisive for India as it was for Europe. On 3 September 1939, the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, declared India to be at war and assumed special powers, something he did without consulting either Congress or the League. Congress asked the viceroy, not unreasonably as the party with the largest pan-Indian electorate, what British war aims were and what guarantees could be given of Indian independence afterwards. Linlithgow’s replies were vague, only promising discussions on ‘Dominion status’ after the hostilities were over. It was not enough. Memories of Indian sacrifice in the First World War were fresh and on 15 November 1939 all the Congress ministries resigned.
Yet Congress was slow to take advantage of the British in their hour of need. Many sympathised with British war aims and were strongly anti-Fascist. This was, however, soon to change. In 1940, Churchill, a strong opponent of Indian independence and who had opposed the 1935 Act, became prime minister. In 1941 he and President Roosevelt made the Atlantic Charter declaration that said all peoples had a right to choose their own government. However, Churchill said that it did not apply to India, which ‘was quite a separate problem’.51 Churchill’s intransigence over India, which he still saw through the eyes of a young cavalry officer who had served there in the late 1890s, was to be a major factor in Congress’ subsequent actions. Then in February 1942 Singapore fell to the Japanese, followed by the humiliating British retreat through Burma. Not only were the mighty British on the run from an Asiatic power but it also looked as if the Japanese would invade India.
From August 1942 two major movements came to dominate Indian life. On 7 August, after their meeting in Bombay, Congress’ attitude changed. Urged on by Gandhi, they now launched a major civil disobedience movement, ‘Quit India’. This was to prove fairly ineffective in practical terms but it was a major distraction to the British war effort. It failed because Linlithgow quickly jailed the Congress leadership, taking them out of the political debate at a critical time and allowing Jinnah to consolidate the position of the Muslim League. The second movement was the British mobilising India to a war footing, increasing the army from 175,000 to over 2 million. This was far more than just a recruiting exercise. The previous rather delicate balance of ‘classes’ that the army had used to structure itself was now impossible to maintain and, with rapid mechanisation, there was a mass modernisation that exposed Indians from all areas and backgrounds to trades and experiences that would previously have been foreign to them. Indians also worked alongside a new class of British soldiers, men who had not been brought up in the stifling attitudes of the Raj, and who treated them as equals. Indian industry received a huge boost from the war economy, resulting in higher employment and wages. India’s war effort proved to be exceptional, and however much criticism Wavell, Auchinleck (the commander-in-chief) and Linlithgow earned from subsequent events, the effort that put the 14th Army into the field so that it could drive the Japanese out of Burma and lead to their ultimate defeat should never be underestimated.
Yet the war years in India were overshadowed by something much more terrible and destructive. The Bengal famine of 1942–4 killed six times as many human beings as all the other British Empire losses in the Second World War. The actual number who died is unclear and was subject to endless revision as the figures were used to justify differing political positions. The 1943 Famine Enquiry originally estimated 1.5 million while most later estimates, allowing for subsequent deaths from disease resulting from malnutrition, have calculated nearer 3 million.52 The famine showed clearly both how the British administration in India had only ever been skin deep and just how inadequate and demoralised it had become by the early 1940s. It must remain one of the most shaming events in the whole history of Empire.
Famines were certainly not new in India and had occurred regularly in the second half of the nineteenth century. The worst were in 1876–8, mainly in Bombay, Madras and Hyderabad, when up to 5 million people died, and the awful famines of 1898–1902 when the toll may have been as high as 19 million. Although it is less straightforward to apportion blame then, when the government had poor communications and little transport, it is nevertheless hard to empathise with the veteran district officer who blamed the 1899 famine in Gujarat on the Gujurati being a ‘soft man . . . unused to privation, accustomed to earn his food easily’ and ‘who seldom worked at all in the hot weather’.53 Equally many dedicated and selfless British officials lost their lives from disease as they struggled to provide relief; Central India remains dotted with their graves. But what makes the 1942–4 famine so terrible is that it took place when it was in the government’s power to prevent it and when the supply of food was a critical part of the war effort. In Great Britain an elaborate system of rationing had been introduced and a Ministry of Food set up as early as 1936; the Atlantic convoys that helped keep Britain fed took much of the nation’s resources. Yet nobody thought of establishing a food department in famine-prone India until 1942 by which time it was too late. ‘Starvation, death and pestilence have been known to follow in the wake of victorious tyrants over running foreign territory but in the present instance, however, this gigantic tragedy is being enacted whilst a well established government is functioning’, complained K. C. Neogy, a member of the Bengal Assembly for a rural district near Dacca, who will later feature significantly in this story.54
What is even worse about the Bengal famine (1942–4) is that it was caused not by a shortage of food but by an inability to ensure it was fairly distributed. The food situation had always been precarious in India – Kipling famously wrote that the life of the Indian peasant was ‘a long drawn out question between a crop and a crop’ – but it was particularly so in Bengal. Sir Jogendra Singh, Member for Education, Health and Lands on the Viceroy’s Executive Council, said that prior to the famine he estimated that even before the war only 39 per cent of Bengalis were well nourished; 41 per cent were poorly nourished and 20 per cent had insufficient food.55 The reason for this was that half the farming families in rural Bengal owned less than two acres and were dependent on agricultural wages to
have enough money to eat; many were also already indebted to their landlords.
The Bengal climate supports three rice harvests a year. The boro or rabi, sown in November and harvested in the early spring; the aus, sown in the spring and harvested in the early autumn and the aman, sown in May and harvested in the late autumn. Of the three it is the aman that is by far the most important, accounting for 73 per cent of total production. In 1942 the aman was damaged by a series of cyclones, and the subsequent heavy rain caused some disease although the harvest was still 83 per cent of 1941 levels. However, at the same time grain supplies from Burma were cut off by the Japanese occupation. These were not actually that significant, being somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 tons, but taken together with the crop damage this started a scare in a population already worried about the Japanese advance. The government didn’t help by evacuating the productive coastal areas in case of invasion, and confiscating fishing boats so they would not be used by the enemy, reducing the availability of fish, a critical source of protein. They also took over some land for the army and brought extra labour to Calcutta for war industries. None of these factors had a significant effect on the overall supply of grain but they did cause nervousness and encourage hoarding. The price of grain started to rise. Throughout 1942 the price of rice doubled from about 6 rupees per maund56 to 14 rupees by December but worse was to come. Between January and August 1943 it had risen to 37 rupees, a six-fold increase in eighteen months. Actual stocks remained fragile but were not significantly reduced. Food stocks in 1943 were in fact 11 per cent higher than they had been in 1941 and, even allowing for the wartime influx of refugees and the army, the population had not increased by more than 9 per cent.57 But the rural poor could not afford to buy rice and the governments in Delhi and Bengal appeared incapable of introducing a system of price control or rationing that would have allowed them to do so or given them the minimum to survive.
The effect in the villages of rural Bengal was catastrophic. The average agricultural worker held very small stocks. In some areas unscrupulous landlords insisted on buying these at a price they dictated on pain of eviction; the evil Indian landlord has become as much a historical truism as the arrogant British official. But there were also acts of village charity and mutual support. However, once any surplus had gone, families ‘resorted to selling the few possessions they had – first their domestic utensils and ornaments, then parts of their dwellings such as doors, windows and corrugated iron sheets, trade implements, clothes and domestic animals if they had any to more fortunate neighbours at cut throat prices’.58 By June 1943 the situation had become desperate. Children were being sold partly so they didn’t have to be fed but also to raise money. Murder was common to seize hoarded stocks. But for most the only solution was to leave and head for the cities. ‘Under the scorching rays of the summer sun a strange silence is enveloping villages’, noted one observer.59 The Tinkori family were typical. Forced to sell their stocks and possessions at an artificially low price to their landlord, Ganga Singh, they eventually couldn’t afford to buy seed. Already in debt they were unable to pay rent and were evicted and their land given to a friend of the estate accountant. So under cover of darkness:
[Tinkori] put his bundle of household goods on his head and, with his wife Toti and his daughter Chandi walked out along the road. After a long and melancholy journey the family entered the outskirts of the town where large numbers of straw huts and clay caves stood like rubbish heaps of piles of manure. Tinkori and his family settled down in a small clearing by a ditch among the heaps of humanity.60
Even if they made it to the cities there was little relief available. Camps were set up around Calcutta but could only take 55,000 people, a tiny proportion of the requirement. By August 1943 about 2,000 people were dying on the streets of Calcutta every week although Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India, was insisting in Westminster that it was only 1,000.61 ‘In a city like Calcutta dead bodies are lying on the road’, said Bankin Mukherjee in a speech on 6 November. ‘A child dies in agony in the lap of its mother while the mother leaves it behind.’62 Wavell, on his first visit after he had taken over as viceroy in October 1943, wrote that he had seen a ‘destitute woman and several destitute children’ in a bazaar near Contai. ‘The children were sucking water out of a bucket in which an old gur bag had been placed.’63 A ‘mental demoralization’ took control of the victims. ‘Children, reduced to skin and bone, had got into the habit of feeding like dogs. You tried to give them a decent meal but they would break away and start wandering about and eat filth.’64 By October any form of mutual respect had vanished. ‘The villagers are themselves getting callous about it. One [village] head is quoted as saying about those dying “what does it matter – they are the useless ones”.’65
What is so shocking about the famine is not just the appalling death toll but the official reaction. An equally strange hopelessness seems to have gripped the governments both in Delhi and Calcutta. The Bengal government was a coalition. Khwaja Nazimuddin, the premier, and Huseyn Suhrawardy, the Minister for Supply, were both Muslim politicians but not supporters of the League. They were technically responsible for food supplies and were roundly blamed by the British governor, Sir Jack Herbert, for not doing enough. Yet the problem was clearly one that called for intervention and assistance, something that the 1935 Act had foreseen when it made provision for the governor to assume control in an emergency. Herbert, however, confined himself to hand-wringing. As well as blaming Nazimuddin’s ministry, he blamed Delhi, writing to Linlithgow, the viceroy, in July 1943, that ‘unless the food situation is taken in hand efficiently . . . and that can only be done by the central government, a position will be reached in which I cannot guarantee the indispensable requirements of the war effort’.66 He went on to say that as Bengal had been allocated an inadequate quota under Delhi’s ‘Revised Basic Plan’ for food redistribution across India, then he ‘must disown all responsibility for the deterioration of the position in Bengal’.
Linlithgow in turn blamed Herbert. ‘I am forming the strong impression that Herbert has no real control of what is going on. I am told that his cabinet meetings consist very often of little more than an interminable and rather muddled homily by the Governor,’ he complained to Leo Amery but he did nothing about it even when Herbert went down with appendicitis.67 While this high-powered war of elegant words continued, the junior officials began to fall out under the strain. Leonard George Pinnell, the competent director of Civil Supplies in Bengal and J. R. Blair, the chief secretary, both resigned in August. On 10 August, Mr Justice Biswas, a High Court judge, took the unusual step of telling the Hindustan Times that the present situation was ‘due to the stupid and scandalous bungling of the powers that be . . . the government seem to remain undecided about the course they should adopt’.68 Debates were held on whether to introduce price controls as early as March 1943 but it was decided that it was too difficult. Seizing stocks at a fixed price was also ruled out as being too coercive. Officials were told to just buy what they could at market rates, thus pushing prices even higher.
Linlithgow himself did little more than blame the war. He appears to have only visited Bengal once, and then in disguise, during the whole of the famine period. His officials in Delhi, although they looked at diverting food supplies from the rest of India, again engaged in a war of words with Calcutta. Major General Wood, a competent man who had impressed in several roles, told the Bengal government that they could not expect any more help ‘until Bengal’s hidden stocks are prised loose’.69 It was not until Wavell arrived in October 1943 that things started to improve. His first act as viceroy was to tour Bengal and within a week he had deployed the army, despite its priority being clearing the Japanese from Burma. By January 1944 he had established 347 civil emergency hospitals and 18 large military hospitals and deployed 1,700 extra public health staff. He found the ‘Bengal administration a mass of corruption and dishonesty from top to bottom’ and ‘that the pilfering and misap
propriation of food grains was now on such a scale as to make relief measures largely ineffective’.70 He was unimpressed with Thomas Rutherford, who had finally taken over from Herbert, and thought him ‘not up to a hard day’s work’.71 The army found it disturbing work. ‘We were with 8 battalions diverted en route to the front’, recorded D. K. Palit, later a highly decorated Indian general but then a junior officer in the Baluch Regiment. ‘The people were very affected – grievously affected. We stayed 4–5 months; our soldiers ended up cooking for the people. We felt the famine was an act of man.’72
By January 1944, Wavell thought that the worst of the crisis was passing, although deaths from disease caused by persistent malnutrition would continue to kill large numbers of people for the next year. He now turned his attention to pressing Churchill and the London government to divert shipping so that India could build up a reserve of grain. Churchill’s refusal to release Allied shipping from the war to transport grain to Bengal had become a major issue by mid-1943. In September 1943, Linlithgow had pressed, rather ineffectively, for the import of 1.5 million tons but the Cabinet had agreed only to 500,000 tons over the following six months. Very little of this had started to arrive, with Churchill adamantly maintaining that it was not a priority, and that shipping was urgently required elsewhere. Wavell now took up the fight and was much more direct. ‘I warn with all seriousness that if they refuse our demands they are risking a catastrophe’, he told Amery on 9 February 1944, and, not for the last time, threatened to resign. Churchill still prevaricated, although a disastrous bout of Indian weather in March did make him ask the Americans what ships they could spare. They refused to provide any but by that stage supplies were beginning to drift in. By June 350,000 tons of wheat had arrived with a further 400,000 committed and with the harvests now looking better, Wavell finally agreed that supplies could be at a safe level.73
Partition Page 5
