Lest we forget the dead of 1943
Garga Chatterjee speaks of known deaths, hidden genocide
Churchill's Secret War The British Empire and the Ravaging Of India During World War II Madhusree Mukerjee Tranquebar
In late October ended, seventy years ago, the Battle of Britain. Britain roughed up through a barrage of Nazi assault. I read about it and thought about the glory of Britain at that hour, of Churchill's leadership.I was in awe - shabash Britain. I am sure many people from privileged circles in India at the time were also relieved. Being of the present generation and coming of a middle-class family, I can vaguely trace this strain back in my life and it is interesting to me how that has lived on and how I have changed. I grew up in Kolkata, West Bengal. And I do not know where it came from, but an explicit respect, admiration and even aspiration to many things British were there. The same thought, said in English, sounded better, more respectable than in my mother tongue Bangla.Then at a slightly later stage, I learned about the Second World War in its gripping detail, how Britain and the Allies were fighting a life and death battle not for their survival, but for saving the world from Nazi and Fascist dictatorships. The British were occupiers, colonizers no doubt, but they were benign, I learned. The Britishers who plundered Bengal post 1757, or for that matter the Britishers who killed Khudiram or mutilated the thumbs of the weavers of Murshidabad, were not the paternalistic civil servants of the 1930s and 1940s. They understood and empathized, thought we were almost humans or would get there soon. And compared to the Nazis who killed millions of Jews, gypsies, gays and others, the British regime was so much reputed as being compassionate. We were taught that. I learned that. All the major Indian political forces, the Congress, the Muslim League and the Communist Party, collaborated with the British, collected war funds. India's political freedom could wait. These were, after all, times of global danger. At least there was no planned genocide in India during the war, something the German regime of the time was indulging in. Or was there? With time, and it did take time, doubts started creeping in. This viewpoint that there was a benign colonial occupation during the last phases of the British regime in India is something which many today maintain. They also point to red-brick railway stations, old government buildings and universities and the ridiculous white wigs of court judges, transportation, education, justice. The works. We had been saved, verily. The gods be praised! What would have happened if the Nazis or the Japanese came? To me there is nothing more fundamental as a marker of humanity than dignity and commitment towards the preservation of human life.The Nazis had a pathetic record on this count. The British were worse, and except for 1770, never more so than in that high noon of solidarity with Britain, during the Second World War. We have been fed a steady diet of the crimes of mass murders by grain requisitioning and other methods by the regimes of Stalin and Mao. There may be some dispute about the numbers but those supreme acts of inhuman criminality have been bested by the British regime in my Bengal. In the induced famine of 1770 (1176 of the Bangla calendar, hence Chhiyattorer monnontor - the famine of 76), oppressive British policies, including but not limited to taxes and grain monopolies, killed one-third of my people, 10 million of them. In April 1770, as the famine reached its height, land tax assessment for the next year was increased by 10% after a five-fold increase since the British usurpation of power. Around 1770, the world population was approximately 800 million. The British managed to kill off more than one per cent of the world's population, right here in Bengal, without the sophistication of machines. Technologically superior to the Britishers of 1770, the Nazis in their grand visions of cleansing managed to match this: they killed civilians to the tune of 1-2% of the world population, in the entirety of the Second World War. But the British killed too. And they killed us, here in Bengal. We raised money to help Churchill do that. Three million humans were killed in and around Bengal, by the British and the grain-hoarders. Explicit decisions were taken at the highest level of the British government, with then Prime Minister Winston Churchill being directly and explicitly complicit, to kill, as it were, Indians by shipping stupendous quantities of grain stocks for the armies in Europe and to feed humans in Britain.This has been exquisitely documented by Madhusree Mukherjee in her recent book, Churchill's Secret War. The provisional government of Free India, led by Subhas Chandra Bose, made an offer of sending 100,000 tonnes of rice as assistance.This was during the Burma campaign. Our non-Nazi benign lords rejected the offer. The armies were fighting the war after all. Our war, indeed. Our army. The brown officers of the Indian Army earned their medals from the British for their collaboration. And the show went on. During the whole period of the war, the number of civilian deaths due to war in Britain was approximately 67,000. In Bengal alone in 1943-44, it was 3 million. In no account do they appear as casualties of the Second World War. It is with survivors' sadness that we have been so dehumanized as to go so far as compare death numbers to demand justice, accountability and, yes, reparations. It is in perfect order to want reparations from Britain. It is not a thing which is unheard of. West Germany gave reparations to Israel as a consequence of its genocide of Jews. The gypsies have had no reparation; they don't have a country and they are persecuted over much of Europe. But what about our countries, India and Bangladesh? Do our governments have any vision of compassion and a spine? To build a world where the killers of people will not go scot-free but will be shamed and humiliated is what the humanity of the brutalizer's stock and the sons and daughters of the accidental survivors among the brutalized must demand. Be it war or genocide, people who kill must atone for their sins, in terms set by the brutalized. We shall not forget genocides. At least this the dead demand from us.
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