Churchill's Secret War

by Madhusree Mukerjee

  Imperial troops should stand aloof, warned the leader of the British opposition, Winston Churchill, and not become the “agencies and instruments of enforcing caste Hindu domination upon the 90 million Muslims and the 60 million Untouchables.”51

  A COLLECTION OF war-related factors had unleashed violence of a kind that India had not witnessed since 1857. But this time, Hindus and Muslims were fighting one another instead of a common enemy and, after almost a thousand years of cohabitation, could no longer see how to live together. Both independence and partition became inevitable, and were scheduled for August 15, 1947.

  Gandhi arrived in Calcutta a week before that date and moved into a vacant house with Suhrawardy (who had had a change of heart) in order to symbolize reconciliation. The Muslims of Calcutta were greatly outnumbered by Hindus and had asked Gandhi to stay in the city, so fearful were they of being attacked; and in return, Gandhi had asked Suhrawardy to ensure that the people of Noakhali would be safe. That region did remain fairly quiet at this time—a hint of the influence that politicians could wield when they so chose. But in the city the killings went on and on, and a desperate Gandhi began a fast that he intended to end through death. “If the riots continue what will I do by merely being alive?” he asked in anguish. “If I lack even the power to pacify the people, what else is left for me to do?”52

  Over the next days, as Gandhi began to waste away, the massacres came to a halt—amazingly, not even murderers wanted his blood on their hands. The weary leader was persuaded to stop fasting. “He was now a broken man, lost, his faith in human beings destroyed,” mourned Gupta, who witnessed the old man’s torment. Gandhi never did celebrate the independence of India, which bore no resemblance to the idyll of freedom and fellowship to which he had dedicated his life. Instead he left for the Punjab, where the slaughter had reached a staggering scale, hoping to diminish the violence there.53

  Although India and Pakistan had just been born, in part by dividing the provinces of Bengal and Punjab, the exact borders between the nations had not been announced. As a result, blood-crazed men sought to separate the Siamese twins by slashing at the flesh that held them together. The gutters of cities ran red, murder and rapine emptied entire districts, and trainloads of refugees became trainloads of corpses. The carnage was much the worse in the northwest of the subcontinent because this region was home to hundreds of thousands of demobilized soldiers. Bands of infantrymen, trained and brutalized by participation in a world war, regrouped into the same clans in which they had earlier fought. (The Indian Army used kinship ties to foster loyalty, with blood relatives assigned to the same platoon and men from the same village joining the same battalion.) They took the machine guns, rifles, hand grenades, bombs, mortars, signaling systems, and other contemporary technology of warfare they had picked up in distant deserts and jungles and turned them upon their neighbors. Some even donned their former khaki or olive uniforms. At least 1 million people were killed and 10 to 15 million displaced.54

  “The fearful massacres which are occurring in India are no surprise to me,” Churchill declaimed in September 1947. “We are, of course, only at the beginning of these horrors and butcheries, perpetrated upon one another, with the ferocity of cannibals, by the races gifted with capacities for the highest culture, and who had for generations dwelt, side by side, in general peace, under the broad, tolerant and impartial rule of the British Crown and Parliament. I cannot but doubt that the future will witness a vast abridgement of the population throughout what has, for sixty or seventy years been the most peaceful part of the world and that, at the same time, will come a retrogression of civilization throughout these enormous regions, constituting one of the most melancholy tragedies that Asia has ever known.”55

  Some time after elections had removed him from power, Churchill had initiated a covert correspondence with Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Speculation abounds as to the contents of the communications between the two men. In one missive dated August 3, 1946—two weeks before the carnage on Direct Action Day—Churchill appears to have suggested that Pakistan could in future invade a defenseless India. But since very few of these letters have been found, and because Jinnah left virtually no record of his personal reflections, the extent to which Churchill had continued to influence events in India cannot be properly gauged. Yet even without the evidence the letters might provide, there can be no doubt that if someone more sympathetic to Indians had been prime minister during the war years—someone less inclined to derail the independence movement by any means possible, whether through incarcerating nationalists or inciting separatists or tolerating starvation—the colony’s freedom would have been attained with far more modest loss of life.56

  So it was that the sun set on the British Empire. Turning their backs on a horizon red with flame and blood, Britannica’s soldiers trudged toward the ships that would carry them home, some marching to this chant:57 Land of shit and filth and wogs

  Gonorrhea, syphilis, clap and pox.

  Memsahib’s paradise, soldiers’ hell

  India, fare thee fucking well.

  On January 30, 1948, a Hindu fanatic shot Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi dead during an open-air prayer meeting in Delhi.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Reckoning

  In 1947, Winston Churchill hired a team of researchers and ghost-writers to formulate the definitive history of World War II. As historian David Reynolds has detailed, the treatise was in actuality a memoir of epic proportions, one in which fact often fell victim to selective memory. When Churchill read out loud parts of the history he was writing, Lord Moran, who remembered the events differently, would wonder, “Could it be that he had come to believe what he wanted to believe?” The Bengal famine received but fleeting mention, in a document that happened to make it into an appendix. Despite their distortions, the six massive volumes became the primary reference for a generation of historians—which may explain why the famine is almost totally absent from the tens of thousands of tomes since written about the war.1

  Behind the scenes, Leopold Amery had done his best to ensure that all the blame for the calamity would fall within India. In late 1943, Viceroy Wavell had faced a vociferous demand from Bengal’s politicians for an enquiry into the famine. The secretary of state for India had advised against any “definite commitment” to that end. When it became impossible to stave off the inquiry, he had helped the viceroy select the members of the famine commission and to impose “specific limitations of kinds of topic which the enquiry is permitted to consider.” These would include an avoidance of “strategical and other circumstances as may have contributed to internal transportation difficulties or affected H.M.G.’s decisions in regard to shipping of imports.” Nor was the commission permitted to summon testimonies from anyone who had since left India (such as Linlithgow).2

  So it was that the famine commission, which began its secret hearings in July 1944, would elucidate all the local factors that had led to the catastrophe—and avoid every lead that pointed back to London. For instance, although the commission deplored the policy of food and boat denial, it heard nothing about scorched earth orders issued by the War Cabinet. The commission also left the impression that only imports of rice, not wheat, would have broken the famine, which was far from having been the case. Nor did it discuss any of the international offers of aid that were rejected.3

  Hints of a cover-up abound. Amery’s diaries do not contain any mention of scorched earth, and his papers are missing the pertinent correspondence with India. The testimonies submitted to the famine commission were reportedly to have been destroyed (except for one copy that survived as the Nanavati Papers). Civil servant Leonard G. Pinnell stated in his unpublished memoir that he had retained his own set of testimonies, but its location is unknown. The unpublished memoir of civil servant Olaf Martin, written some time after the war, is missing pages that appear to have dealt with his refusal to serve as chief secretary of Bengal. “At that time I had to be careful what I said,” Martin recall
ed of 1943, “just as, at present, I have to be careful what I write.”4

  At least one India Office file, on rice exports to Ceylon, has been destroyed and another one, on Canada’s offer of wheat for Bengal, is missing. No figures could be located for rice exports from India in the fiscal year 1943–1944. In the minutes of a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff, available on microfilm at the National Archives of the United Kingdom, a section dealing with shipping to India is blacked out. The cabinet secretaries’ notes on War Cabinet discussions, which were released in January 2006, stop abruptly in mid-1943—just before Churchill, Cherwell, Leathers, and Grigg made their August decision to deny relief to famine-stricken Bengal. Among the papers of Lawrence Burgis, who informally transcribed War Cabinet meetings, no notes on India are available for August 4, 1944, when Churchill’s tirade on the colony induced Amery to compare him with Hitler, but other discussions on that date are recorded. References to Subhas Chandra Bose are conspicuous by their absence in War Cabinet minutes, although the assassination order shows how seriously he was taken as an enemy.5

  IT ALSO APPEARS that the famine commission suppressed the results of a government-sponsored survey on famine mortality. Instead, it provided its own estimate of the death toll—a figure that remains controversial to this day. The public health department had recorded 1,873,749 deaths during 1943. Subtracting from this total the average number of deaths per year (as recorded during the preceding five years), the commission got 688,846 excess deaths during the famine year.6

  This count, the commission noted, did not include those who had died on the roads or in distant towns during their search for food. The death registration figures were highly unreliable for another reason, however: in Bengal the usually illiterate village chowkidar collected all such information. One observer had commented that officials of the Government of India were “very keen on amassing statistics—they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the Chowkydar (village watchman), who just puts down what he damn pleases.” Even in normal times, a discrepancy of 30 percent showed up between death statistics collected by the chowkidar and the more reliable figures compiled during decennial census operations.7

  Moreover, thousands of chowkidars were unpaid in late 1941, and given the progressive breakdown in civil administration as war reached India’s borders and the Quit India movement erupted, there is no reason to suppose that they were paid in 1943. The chowkidar’s salary of 6 rupees a month—plus a “special bonus” of an eighth of a rupee for helping with cyclone relief—was in any case too low for his family’s survival at the prices that prevailed during the famine. Recall that Giribala Malakar of Kalikakundu said that her first husband, a chowkidar, had carried relief materials during the famine and had still starved to death. It is inconceivable that all through 1943 these functionaries were faithfully discharging their manifold duties to the empire. When the famine inquiry committee asked relief commissioner Olaf Martin about the registration figures, he replied, “I know that they are exceedingly bad.”8

  It is even possible that the figures supposedly compiled by the chowkidars were actually filled in by higher-level officials who had little idea of the toll the famine took and perhaps little interest in recording a disturbingly high number of casualties. After the famine Richard Symonds, a charity worker, was employed by the governor of Bengal to help with relief and rehabilitation. In an effort to learn the number of children orphaned by the famine, he sent forms around to the district offices. On a subsequent tour he discovered why the results he’d gotten had made little sense: “At the very bottom of the Government pyramid, the circular would come to an officer who might be less concerned with accuracy than with the consequences for his career.” One functionary might suppose that a small number of orphans would speak to his zealousness in supplying relief; another might figure that a large number of orphans would lead to generous funds arriving for their support. In sum, the figure either man would put down would be fictitious.9

  Demographers Tim Dyson and Arup Maharatna noted a peculiar pattern in the registration data for West Bengal (the piece of Bengal province that went to India after the partition). During the years 1941 to 1946, the proportion of deaths in certain districts remained exactly the same—a sign that the numbers had been manufactured from the figures for undivided Bengal. Had village-level registration data been available, such manipulation would not have been necessary.10

  Be that as it may, the famine commission declared that “there was no universal breakdown in 1943 in the system of recording deaths.” After introducing a correction for the usual shortfall in death registrations and for roadside deaths, it concluded: “The number of deaths in excess of the average in 1943 was of the order of one million—that is, some 40 percent, in excess of the officially recorded mortality. We have found no valid reason for accepting estimates in excess of this figure. On the other hand, the high excess mortality in 1944 must be added to the toll of mortality. On this basis we must conclude that about 1.5 million deaths occurred as a direct result of the famine and the epidemics which followed in its train.”11

  Diverse authors have applied equally diverse corrections to the raw numbers supposedly collected by the chowkidars to obtain other estimates for the mortality. Economist Amartya Sen took the registered deaths for West Bengal, extended them to East Pakistan (nowadays Bangladesh), and applied corrections to get around 3 million for the famine toll. Dyson and Maharatna used figures that they unearthed for undivided Bengal, argued that the system of data collection had remained essentially intact during the famine, and got 2.1 million.12

  Intriguingly, historian Paul Greenough discovered that a careful statistical survey of famine mortality had been presented to the famine commission but was never published or publicized. Calcutta was home to one of the world’s foremost statisticians, Prasanta C. Mahalanobis, who had founded the Indian Statistical Institute in 1931. By means of exploratory projects in Bengal, Mahalanobis had developed the sample survey, which permits reliable results for the many to be inferred from those for the appropriately chosen few. To that end he had devised pilot surveys (preliminary studies that help refine the design of the final, exhaustive one), overlapping samples, and other means of reducing error. Mahalanobis would go on to become a Fellow of the Royal Society and to run the United Nations statistics bureau.13

  In late 1943 and early 1944, Mahalanobis and his team designed and carried out an elaborate survey, at government expense, of the famine victims. The researchers interviewed the members of 13,358 households in a representative spectrum of districts and villages to estimate a total number of deaths during 1943 of 3.1 million. (This is not the famine toll, as will presently become clear.) The death rate in Bengal in 1943 came out to be 5.3 percent. The worst-affected subdivision was Bhola in the southeast, with a death rate of 14.79 percent.14

  The survey had its own shortcomings, but these were precisely defined, allowing for a more solid grasp of the problem than the squishy registration data would allow. To begin with, Mahalanobis did not include the deaths of children less than one year old because the respondents were unreliable on that figure. Second, the survey depended on the reports of relatives, and so could not account for individuals who were missing—some of whom must have died—or for families that had perished in their entirety. (In Kalikakundu at least one family, consisting of Behari and Duari Das and their teenage son, died out.) Third, Mahalanobis did not get to repeat the survey to account for deaths from famine-related disease during 1944 and later. Fourth—and this is the most difficult problem—in order to calculate the famine toll, one has to subtract from the total number of deaths those that would have occurred in the absence of famine.

  The “normal” rate of death is very hard to determine, because the death rate varies from time to time and from place to place. The mortality rate for India as a whole is b
elieved to have been 2.1 in 1942, but no data specific to Bengal are available. Compared to the politically favored northwest, the state of nutrition and health in Bengal was miserable, and Mahalanobis assumed a normal death rate of 4 percent for the province, based on the census of 1931.15

  One can gauge the applicability of this death rate to the early 1940s by reviewing how mortality in Bengal might have evolved during the 1930s. The rate of land sales offers strong evidence that economic distress increased all through that decade. (This kind of data is reliable because land sales, unlike deaths, had to be registered in order to take effect.) The number of land sales in Bengal in 1929 had been 79,929, but the frequency of such transactions increased steadily so that in 1938 the figure was three times as high. The next year—when the war began—the sales doubled, and they continued to rise until in 1942 the number was 749,495. In 1943, the famine year, the figure doubled again, to 1,532,241. Since an owner parted with land only as a last resort—to save his life and that of his family—these figures indicate that the suffering in Bengal, and in all likelihood the mortality rate, increased throughout the depression and war years and reached a peak with the famine.16