There were 31 serious famines in 120 years of British rule compared with 17 in the 2,000 years before British rule ~ Mike Davis writing in Late Victorian Holocausts Up to 29 million Indians were killed in famines exacerbated by British policies. 1. In 1877 and 1878, during the famine the British diverted rice and wheat production to England, and the workers were given less food than the Jewish inmates of Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp of World War II. 2. In 1901, The Lancet estimated that at least 19 million Indians had died in western India during the famine of the 1890s. The death toll was so high because the British refused to implement famine relief. 3. The Bengal Famine of 1943-44 led to the death of nearly 4 million Indians because of an artificial famine created by the British government. 4. Winston Churchill, the British PM during the second World War, had this attitude towards starving Indians: the starvation of anyhow underfed Bengalis (was) less serious than sturdy Greeks. And to quote the beast himself: I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. Why does then a section of the Indian elite think the Brits did us some kind of favour? They were rapacious, brutal colonialists, and it is high time we started treating them as such: in our current discourse as well as in our history books. (all facts stated have been drawn from this article in - would you believe it! - Tehelka: tehelka/remembering-indias-forgotten-holocaust/)
Posted on: Thu, 19 Jun 2014 20:44:22 +0000
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