The Bengal Famine in 1943. A “manmade holocaust” official documents and oral accounts of survivors paint a horrifying portrait of how Churchill, as part of the Western war effort, ordered the diversion of food from starving Indians to already well-supplied British soldiers and stockpiles in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, including Greece and Yugoslavia. /.../ I hate Indians, he (Churchill) told the Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault, he declared at a war-cabinet meeting, for breeding like rabbits. /.../ some of Indias grain was also exported to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to meet needs there, even though the island wasnt experiencing the same hardship; Australian wheat sailed past Indian cities (where the bodies of those who had died of starvation littered the streets) to depots in the Mediterranean and the Balkans; and offers of American and Canadian food aid were turned down. India was not permitted to use its own sterling reserves, or indeed its own ships, to import food. And because the British government paid inflated prices in the open market to ensure supplies, grain became unaffordable for ordinary Indians. (quotes from the Time magazine article) content.time/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992,00.html
Posted on: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 21:56:23 +0000
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