Churchill's Secret War

by Madhusree Mukerjee

  British officials in India were understandably alarmed by reports of food stringencies back home. The prime minister had warned of living “hand to mouth”; the secretary of state for India had stated that British rations, which were “already cut to bone,” might have to be further trimmed to meet the colony’s demands; and the viceroy of India had informed provincial governors that home rations might have to be reduced in order to send wheat to India. In late December 1942, the Ministry of War Transport had congratulated the India Office on dealing “so firmly” with the colony’s request for cereals, and expressed a hope “that the demand is at least watered down, if not eliminated.” According to the ministry, meeting the Indian need would have reduced U.K. imports by a million tons in 1943.68

  Even when they hit bottom in March, however, U.K. stocks were between 2 million and 5 million tons above the various estimates of necessary minimum levels. Thus the Indian cereal requirement posed no actual threat to British rations. The warnings had nevertheless suggested to expatriate civil servants that their shortcomings were adding to the troubles of their beleaguered countrymen. “I am fully confident you will agree that if we can save, by our own efforts in India, even one of the ships [diverted to bring grain], then we shall have made a significant contribution to easing the burden on those responsible for directing the war,” the viceroy had exhorted.69

  So it was that the Government of India came to measure the food problem by the yardstick of the United Kingdom’s needs. When officials could feed the army and the industrial population for some months, and thereby keep up the war effort, they figured they had enough. Rather than importune the War Cabinet for ships, they chose to ignore the distress in the eastern villages. In late spring, the viceroy informed Governor Herbert that little could be done about the food shortage, which would likely persist for the duration of the war.70

  In any event, India received a little less than 30,000 tons of wheat by July 1943 (plus the 30,000 that had been previously promised to the army). That is, of the 600,000 tons that the viceroy had requested in December 1942 as being essential to avert disaster, it received less than 5 percent. As a result, only a quarter of the wheat that the Government of India had promised to send to Bengal in the first half of 1943 could arrive in that province. Most of that, in turn, remained in Calcutta for use by the priority classes, with small quantities being sent to the districts for official use. In April, an intelligence summary observed that “large numbers of starving people” were emigrating from the province—a marker of famine as given in the Bengal Famine Code, the official manual for the region.71

  Curiously, the Government of India chose not to explain to the Bengal administration why it was unable to help out in supplying wheat. Instead it insisted that the province had more than enough rice. “This shortage is a thing entirely of your own imagination,” Justice Henry B. L. Braund of Bengal’s Department of Civil Supplies said he had been told by officials of the Government of India in March 1943. “We do not believe it and you have got to get it out of your head that Bengal is deficit. You have got to preach that there is sufficiency in Bengal and if you wait you will find that there is sufficiency in Bengal.” Civil servant Pinnell was similarly instructed, by Major General E. Wood of New Delhi’s Department of Food, that if only he would “preach the gospel of sufficiency” and hint that large imports of grain might suddenly arrive and drive down prices, he would draw out hoarded stocks. Meanwhile he should battle any misconceptions about shortages “by attacking and confining on a large scale those who were likely to be its exponents.” A food minister was appointed for Bengal—Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy of the Muslim League—and although he believed a famine to be approaching, “he was not allowed by the Government of India to say so.” On the contrary, he announced that the province faced no shortages.72

  If the brokers who were hoarding could be persuaded of abundance or of impending shipments, they would certainly release hidden stocks; but they were not deceived. A witness to the famine commission offered another reason for the Government of India’s assertion of sufficiency: “We were told that they were insisting on this in order to purchase rice for export.” In December 1942, Pinnell wrote in his memoir, Bengal had been “pressed to agree to export rice” in exchange of receiving wheat for the war effort. Viceroy Linlithgow met Chief Minister Huq in January 1943 and told him that he “simply must produce some more rice out of Bengal for Ceylon even if Bengal itself went short!” The chief minister “was by no means unsympathetic,” Linlithgow reported to Amery, “and it is possible that I may in the result screw a little out of them.”73

  New Delhi had come under “very heavy pressure” from London to continue sending rice to Ceylon, another official confirmed. The source was Winston Churchill. At a meeting of the War Cabinet in November 1942, for instance, the prime minister had demanded “fresh pressure” on India to send an additional 20,000 tons per month (for the next two months) to Ceylon, where rubber tappers were deserting the plantations for lack of rice. The quantity demanded was small compared to India’s total crop, Churchill had argued, ordering that his “[very] strong wish [that] further help be given” be conveyed to India.74

  Pinnell charged that rice was sometimes exported from Calcutta without his knowledge and that it had a “disastrous” impact on prices. By way of example, in about November 1942 “suddenly it was heard that a ship was available and that it must be loaded the very same day,” he related to the famine commission. “You can quite easily buy two or three thousand tons in different places quietly without upsetting the market, but if one man runs round [the market in Howrah, across the river from Calcutta] for the whole quantity to be obtained in the course of the day the effect of that is very severe. As a matter of fact rice disappeared from the Howrah market and prices rose in Calcutta; this had far reaching effect, the Calcutta market dominating the rest of Bengal.” The quantity being exported did not matter as much as the modality, Pinnell felt, for “the very sight of loading a ship with rice in the Calcutta port was certain to create panic in the middle of a crisis.”75

  Nor were the quantities small. Whereas India annually imported at least a million tons of rice and wheat before the war, it exported a net 360,000 tons during the fiscal year April 1, 1942, to March 31, 1943. Of this quantity, 260,000 tons were rice. Gross exports of foodgrains (including lentils) in that fiscal year totaled 465,600 tons. The exports took place after the war had reached India’s borders, imports of rice from Southeast Asia had been cut off, invasion appeared imminent, and hunger marches and food riots had become routine. The exports continued even after the cyclone had damaged the vital winter crop of rice. On April 22, 1943, more than a month after it had been warned of famine, the Ministry of War Transport recorded with approval “continued pressure being brought upon India to persuade her to release more than the previously agreed quotas of rice and, more recently, cargoes of wheat.” Between January and July of 1943, even as famine set in, India exported 71,000 tons of rice, an unknown fraction of it through Calcutta’s port.76

  Shiploads of food departing a captive and stricken land recall the Indian famines of the Victorian era and the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s, when crop failure combined with colonial policy to fell millions. The exports of 1942 and 1943 were far smaller than those of earlier times, but just as damaging given the substantial imports that were needed to keep native souls from departing their bodies. Ceylon, Arabia, and South Africa, where the rice ended up, were already better supplied with grain than was India. But if distributed at relief camps in Bengal at the average rate of a half-kilogram per person per day, 71,000 tons of rice would have kept 390,000 people alive for a full year. The 360,000 tons of wheat and rice, if similarly used, would have saved almost 2 million.77

  On July 21, 1943, the Government of India once again asked Amery for immediate imports, noting that “famine conditions have begun to appear” in parts of southern India and in Bengal.78

  CHAPTER SIX

  An Occupie
d and Starving Country

  Ambassador William Phillips was alarmed at what he saw of India. The Muslim League was gaining in influence, which to his mind made future strife in India more likely. He met Mohammad Ali Jinnah and “felt attracted to him personally but not to his dream of severing India into separate nations,” Phillips wrote later. Another source of worry to him was scant evidence of British interest in the war against Japan, although he noted that the Indian Army was remarkably large: “Was this necessary for the preservation of internal peace I wondered, or were the British hesitant to send this untried army to the battle fronts?” Indeed, the War Cabinet had shifted its subsidiary military focus from India to the Balkans. During the fall of 1943, the United Kingdom would build a stockpile in the Mediterranean region for feeding the Greeks and Yugoslavs it intended to liberate. That meant shiploads of Australian wheat would pass by famine-stricken India, destined not for consumption but for storage.1

  In April 1943, shortly before he was to return to the United States for consultations, Phillips visited Linlithgow at the Himalayan resort of Dehra Dun, where the viceroy was engaged in hunting tigers from elephant-back. The envoy again asked if he might meet Gandhi: he was concerned about rumors that Gandhi was planning a fast, this time to the death. Linlithgow refused Phillips’s request, informing him that if the war effort could be aided “by the holding of Gandhi to death then I would so hold him without the least hesitation.”2

  As it happened, Gandhi regarded his survival through the fast as a divine blessing and was energized by it. Instead of attempting another fast, on May 4 he wrote to Jinnah asking if they could meet to try and reach an understanding about the future political integrity of India. The Government of India referred the matter to the War Cabinet. “Surely a letter from an interned person seeking conference for the purpose of ‘uniting and driving the British out’ should not be delivered while war-time conditions prevail,” Churchill advised, and the missive did not reach the addressee. (Gandhi had not of course written in such terms, knowing full well that the authorities would read the letter.) The government did, however, make the message public to forestall news of it leaking out—and Jinnah dismissed the possibility of any such encounter unless Gandhi first accepted the prospect of a Muslim-majority Pakistan.3

  Back in Washington, Phillips warned the president that it was high time to press the War Cabinet for a conciliatory gesture in India. The people were seeing the war as one between fascists and imperialists, he said, and had no stake in its outcome. “Lassitude and indifference and bitterness have increased as a result of the famine conditions, the growing high cost of living and the continued political deadlock,” he told Roosevelt. The president seemed reluctant to deal with the matter, but he asked Phillips to meet with the prime minister, who happened to be visiting the United States.4

  Ambassador Phillips told Churchill on May 23, 1943, that if indeed the transfer of power to Indians was being held up by disagreement between Hindus and Muslims, the government should try to bridge the gap and, to that end, arrange a meeting between Gandhi and Jinnah. The prime minister did not respond kindly to the suggestion “Take India if that is what you want! Take it by all means!” he raged. “But I warn you that if I open the door a crack there will be the greatest blood- bath in all history; yes, a blood-bath in all history. Mark my words,” he went on, shaking his finger at the envoy, “I prophesied the present war, and I prophesy the blood-bath.”

  Phillips took his leave. Churchill followed him to the top of the stairwell and “repeated once more his certainty of a ‘bloodbath.’” The ambassador was bemused, for he did not have in mind the precipitate withdrawal that Churchill assumed he was proposing. “It was only too clear that he had a complex about India from which he would not and could not be shaken,” Phillips concluded. He had a long talk with Roosevelt, who was an old friend, and told him that his returning to New Delhi would be pointless.

  In his memoir, Phillips would hold British policy responsible for the partition of India that transpired after the war. By the time the war ended, he wrote, “the situation had crystallized”—in that the prolonged incarceration of Congress leaders had enabled a single personable actor, Jinnah, to command the Indian stage. As a result, the idea of Pakistan had captured the imagination of Muslims.5

  A RELIGIOUS BLOODBATH and its possible outcome—the partitioning of India—had been on Churchill’s mind for some time. In March 1943, when a relatively liberal Tory politician, Richard A. Butler, had gone to dinner to the prime minister’s country residence, the conversation turned to India. According to Butler, his host had “launched into a most terrible attack on the ‘baboos,’ saying that they were gross, dirty and corrupt.” He would like to “clear out of India,” he reported Churchill as saying: “Our army is going to be kept there only to prevent one section of the population mauling and murdering the other.” The answer to that problem, the prime minister continued, was Pakistan.

  Surely the British Raj stood for unity among Indians, Butler protested, to which his host responded: “Well, if our poor troops have to be kept in a sweltering, syphilitic climate and lice-infested barracks for the sake of your precious unity, I’d rather see them have a good civil war.” Upon which the prime minister’s wife chided him, prompting Churchill to declare that he liked to rile people who disagreed with him. He went on to explain, however, that he saw the United Kingdom presiding over a “tripos” consisting of a Hindu India, the princely states, and Pakistan. The problem was that “in India we shall be bound by the Americans, if by nobody else, to all the promises we have given”—including the 1942 Cripps offer of dominion status after the war. Which somehow reminded him of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the wife of the leader of the Chinese nationalists fighting alongside the Allies, who, he lamented, was rather too influenced by Nehru—but that was all “offlytoofly; they are in love with one another.”6

  Over the next years, the word Pakistan would turn up in the prime minister’s verbal and written communications with increasing frequency. This suggests that Churchill was becoming fearful that the Indian colony could not be retained for long after the war and was speculating about alternatives. A new nation of Pakistan, beholden to the power that assisted in its birth, would possibly enable the United Kingdom to retain influence in South Asia and perhaps even provide a military base for future operations against the Soviet Union. And which fragment of India could be more desirable for such a stronghold than the rugged northwest, amidst whose “scenes of savage brilliancy” he had spent some of the most exhilarating days of his youth?7

  As nationalists of the Congress festered with impotent rage and religious radicals of the Muslim League flexed their muscles, communal strife in India was indeed becoming more likely. During the monsoon season, Governor George Cunningham of the North West Frontier Province exulted at the Muslim League’s triumph in local elections. “It would not, I think, have been possible had not the ground been prepared by the propaganda which we have been doing almost since the war started, most of it on Islamic lines,” he wrote to the viceroy. British authorities were arguing that Muslims and Christians were natural allies because they each had a holy book, unlike the idolatrous Hindus; and they were describing the region’s most popular leader, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, as anti-Islamic because he was a believer in Gandhian nonviolence. That the charismatic pacifist—and devout Muslim—was behind bars, along with 6,000 of his followers, had also helped the elections deliver the outcome desired by British authorities. By the time “the Frontier Gandhi,” as Ghaffar Khan was known to admirers, would emerge from prison, it would be too late for him to curb the religious furies that imperial policy had unleashed in his homeland. The same would be true of Gandhi himself.8

  Yet throughout 1943, all remained quiet—because tens of millions of people in the rice belt that stretched from Bengal in the east to Cochin in the south had begun to starve. Bereft of physical and mental strength, they could no longer rebel, and the Quit India movement petered out. In
dia was no longer in revolt but simply “an occupied and hostile country,” a British general stated. In July the viceroy wrote an assurance to the secretary of state for India: “politically the position is very easy here at the moment. The fact is that none of these people know what to do. The Moslem League have no wish to do anything, the Congress are completely at a loss.”9

  DEFIANCE PERSISTED IN a few areas, among them Midnapore. The orchestrated violation of so many of the region’s women in January 1943 had so humiliated the rebel leaders that they had publicly renounced their former reluctance to kill for their cause. The newsletter Biplabi instructed women to grab any implements at hand and gather in a prearranged place to resist attackers, should any enter a village when the men were away. The demand for daggers was such that the Tamluk government distributed more than seven thousand of them to village women.10

  Soon after the announcement recanting nonviolence, Sushil Dhara shed blood for the first time. The victim was a high school teacher who had shown the police the homes of several students who had participated in the September 1942 assault on the administration. One night Dhara dressed in an overcoat over a flowing dhuti, just as the government’s agents did, and along with an associate in a fake police uniform went to the teacher’s house and asked him in Hindi to step outside. A senior officer of the Intelligence Bureau, he said, was waiting in the school’s play-ground and needed help with an arrest. The man readily followed them. He was taken to a river at the point of a dagger, stabbed there, and his body carved up and thrown into the water. Dhara’s autobiography is reticent about his actions and emotions during this, the most violent, period of his life, as if he had walked through a door that shut behind him.11