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By Root 1213 0

unable to feed her two young sons for several days, she could no longer endure their suffering. On [23 July] she dropped the smaller boy torn from her womb, the sparkle of her eye, into the Kasai’s frothing waters. She tried in the same way to send her elder son to his father, but he screamed and grabbed onto her … She discovered a new way to silence her child’s searing hunger. With feeble arms she dug a small grave and threw her son into it. As she was trying to cover him with earth a passer-by heard his screams and snatched the spade from his mother’s hand. A [low-caste Hindu] promised to bring up the boy and the mother then went away, who knows where. Probably she found peace by joining her husband in the Kasai’s cold torrent.’

There were widespread cholera outbreaks, with people dying in the streets and parks of major cities: by mid-October 1943, the death rate in Calcutta alone had risen from its usual six hundred a month to 2,000. Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister-in-law wrote from a relief centre describing ‘rickety babies with arms and legs like sticks; nursing mothers with wrinkled faces; children with swollen faces and hollow-eyed through lack of food and sleep; men exhausted and weary, walking skeletons all of them’. She was appalled by ‘the look of weary resignation in their eyes. It wounded my spirit in a manner that the sight of their suffering bodies had not done.’ In October Wavell, by now India’s Viceroy, belatedly deployed troops to move relief supplies. Thereafter, government efforts to assist the population steadily increased, but at least one million and perhaps as many as three million people were dead, and immense political damage had been done. There was no doubt of the logistical difficulties the British faced in assuaging the consequences of natural disaster while fighting a great war. But Churchill responded to Wavell’s increasingly urgent and forceful pleas for aid with a brutal insensitivity which left an irreparable scar on Anglo– Indian relations.

Nehru wrote from prison on 18 September 1943: ‘Reports from Bengal are staggering. We grow accustomed to anything, any depth of human misery and sorrow … More and more I feel that behind all the terrible mismanagement and bungling there is something deeper … the collapse of the economic structure of Bengal.’ He added on 11 November: ‘The Bengal famine has been the final epitaph of British rule and achievement in India.’ Churchill stubbornly refused concessions to nationalist sentiment, dismissing objections from the Americans and their Chinese clients. Leo Amery recoiled in dismay from Churchill’s ravings: ‘Cabinet … [Winston] talked unmitigated nonsense, first of all treating Wavell as a contemptible self-seeking advertiser, and then talking about the handicap India is to defence, and how glad he would be to hand it over to President Roosevelt.’

Yet few British people, fighting for their lives, were much troubled by displays of Indian alienation or imperial repression. They cheered themselves with knowledge that the vast Indian Army, four million strong, remained loyal to the Raj. Indian divisions made a notable contribution to the East Africa, Iraq, North Africa and Italian campaigns, and played the principal role in the 1944–45 struggles for Assam and Burma. British wartime policy could be deemed a success, in that by 1944–45 disorder was almost entirely suppressed; strikes and acts of sabotage dwindled. But posterity can see the irony that while Britain fought the Axis in the name of freedom, to retain control of India it practised ruthless governance without popular consent, and adopted some of the methods of totalitarianism.

Britain’s wartime treatment of its subject races remained humane by German or Japanese standards; there were no arbitrary executions or wholesale massacres. But India was not the only imperial possession in which the exigencies of emergency were used to justify neglect, cruelty and injustice. In 1943, famines afflicted Kenya, Tanganyika and British Somaliland; at various moments there were food riots in Tehran, Beirut, Cairo