Inferno - Max Hastings [268]
Bose formed a women’s brigade, the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, in honour of a heroine of the 1857 rising against the British, and marched with it from Rangoon to Bangkok. One recruit asserted in a radio broadcast: “I am not a doll soldier, or a soldier in mere words, but a real soldier in the true sense of the word.” A contingent of 500 reached Burma from Malaya late in 1943, but the women were disappointed to find themselves relegated to nursing duties. Men’s units were deployed against Slim’s army in Assam and Burma. One soldier, P. K. Basu, said later: “I did not believe that the INA would actually succeed, but I believed in the INA”; two INA regiments were named for Gandhi and Nehru. There was a yawning gulf between Bose’s rhetoric and the INA’s contribution to the Axis war effort. When its poorly armed units were deployed in battle, their Japanese sponsors treated them with disdain, and few showed stomach for serious fighting. Some imperial Indian troops shot INA prisoners out of hand, but the British were embarrassed by the renegade force’s very existence and dismayed to find that a substantial number of Indians regarded Bose as a hero—as they do today.
THE MOST SERIOUS BLOT upon the wartime Raj, and arguably upon Britain’s entire war effort, was the 1943–44 Bengal famine. The loss of Burma deprived India of 15 percent of its food supplies. When a series of floods and cyclones—natural catastrophes to which low-lying East Bengal is chronically vulnerable—struck the region, wrecking its 1942 harvest, the population fell prey to desperate hunger. Much transport was destroyed, further impeding movement of food supplies. A Bengali fisherman named Abani was among millions who lost their livelihoods. “We could not afford to buy a net … The moneylender would not give me a loan. The moneylender himself had no money. Our family possessions had been destroyed in the flood: of eight cows we only saved one.” By December, people were dying. In the following year, their plight became catastrophic. In October 1943 a relief worker named Arangamohan Das reported from Terapekhia bazaar on the Haldi River. “There I saw nearly 500 destitutes of both sexes, almost naked and reduced to bare skeletons. Some of them were begging for food … from the passers by, some longing for food with piteous look, some lying by the wayside approaching death hardly with any more energy to breathe and actually I had the misfortune of seeing eight peoples breathe their last before my eyes.”
Censors intercepted a letter from an Indian soldier embittered by his experience during leave: “We come home to our own villages to find the food is scarce and high-priced. Our wives have been led astray and our land has been misappropriated. Why does the Sarkar [government] not do something about it now rather than talking about post-war reconstruction?” Why not, indeed? The British government refused to divert scarce shipping to famine relief; India Secretary Leo Amery at first adopted a cavalier attitude. Even when he began to exert his influence in favour of intervention, the prime minister and cabinet remained unsympathetic. In 1943, sailings to Indian Ocean destinations were cut by 60 percent, as shipping was diverted to sustain Allied amphibious operations, aid to Russia and Atlantic convoys; the British cabinet met only 25 percent of Delhi’s requested food deliveries. Churchill wrote in March 1943, applauding the minister of war transport’s refusal to release ships to move relief supplies: “A concession to one country … encourages demands from all the others. [The Indians] must learn to look after themselves as we have done … We cannot afford to send ships merely as a gesture of goodwill.” A few months later, he said: “There is no reason why all parts of the British Empire should not feel the pinch in the same way as the Mother Country has done.”
But the