Amartya Sen describes his first experience of the Great Bengal Famine in his memoirs. It is evident that this was either a 'food availability deficit' famine of else the Muslim League Government had deliberately taken away food supplies so as to kill millions of people. What the famine could not have been was 'distributional' or caused by one group of workers getting big wage increases and using that money to eat twice as much rice as they had previously so as to have the pleasure of watching another group of workers starve to death.
At the end of a class in the spring of 1943, we were told by some younger students that a man with evident mental derangement, who had just appeared on the Santiniketan campus, was being cruelly teased by a couple of school bullies. We went to the scene of this barbaric activity — near the cricket ground — and, while the two bullies were individually stronger than each of us on our own, there were a great many of us who together could give them pause.
So, Shantiniketan had bullies same as any other school. It wasn't a paradise.
After the tormenters left with some angry words, we tried to talk to the victim. He was barely coherent, but we gathered that he had not eaten anything for nearly a month. One of our teachers joined us as we were conversing, and we gathered from him that prolonged starvation often does produce mental derangement.
What caused Sen's own mental derangement such that he would claim that this famine was not caused by lack of food availability? Was his own family hoarding food or did his granny insist he eat twice the amount of rice and then go stand outside with a bulging tummy so as to make fun of those who were starving?
That was my first direct contact with a famine victim. But soon there were others who came into our neighbourhood in the hope of escaping starvation.
If there was no 'food availability deficit' in Shantiniketan, they would have escaped starvation. Indeed, they would soon have become healthy and robust.
Their numbers grew as the classes stopped in May for the summer vacation. My parents joined me in Santiniketan (it was my father’s holiday too, at Dhaka University) as famished victims kept arriving in larger and larger numbers. By the time the school reassembled in July, the trickle had grown into a torrent of miserable humanity. They were looking for anything whatever that they could eat. Most of them were on their way to Calcutta, nearly a hundred miles away, having heard rumours of arrangements there for the feeding of destitutes. These rumours were vastly exaggerated. The government was not, in fact, providing any relief and private charities were woefully inadequate. But because of the rumour it was to Calcutta that the starving wanted to go. From us, they wanted a little help with food — maybe even leftover or rotten food — to allow them to survive as they continued their journey, on the way to Calcutta.
So- the countryside (which is where food is grown) had a food availability deficit. That's why the hungry wanted to get to the big City where they hoped the Muslim League administration would feed them and thus secure their loyalty and their votes. However, because of wartime conditions, Calcutta could not import food from even non-Japanese held territories. Thus there was a food availability deficit. Shurawardy, the Minister of supply, had raided a lot of supposed 'hoarders' but it was apparent that stocks had fallen everywhere. There was a full blown food availability deficit across the state. No doubt, if the other Indian states had enabled transfer of food surpluses, this problem might have been mitigated. However, any blame attaching to this horrible outcome would have to attach to Indian politicians or ICS officers- like B.R Sen who had warned of the coming famine in 1942 and who had then been put in charge of Food in Delhi in 1943.
The situation continued to worsen, and by September we thought that perhaps 100,000 destitute people had passed through Santiniketan on their long journey to the big city. The continuous cries for help — from children and women and men — ring in my ears even today, seventy-seven years later.
B.R Sen saw all this for himself. That's why, when he became the head of the FAO, he helped countries to increase food supply and improve its distribution so as to tackle the underlying problem- viz. food availability deficit. This approach worked spectacularly. By the Seventies, it was obvious that even India could feed itself. By contrast, back in 1919, Keynes thought that Germany would starve unless it conquered territory in Ukraine and Poland. He predicted that America would be a net food importer! Sen, similarly, emphasized only Demand and neglected the Supply side. What is remarkable is that he had seen a great food availability deficit family for himself. Indeed, East Bengal (which is where his family was from before they were ethnically cleansed) had two transitions to popularly elected Government during his lifetime and on both occasions there was a full blown famine. In other words, transition to Democracy is correlated with increased vulnerability to famine only in Sen's ancestral homeland. Yet that cretin has been saying 'Democracy prevents Famine' for fifty years now!
My grandmother allowed me to give a cigarette tin full of rice to anyone who begged for food, but she explained, ‘even if it breaks your heart, you cannot give any more than one tin-can of rice to anyone, since we have to help as many people as we can.’
Why was granny so mean? The answer is because enough food was not available.
I knew that small cans of rice would not go very far, but I was glad that we could at least do something to help.
That help consisted of making food available, not talking worthless bollocks.
It is certainly possible that if Congress, not the Muslim League, had been in power in Bengal, then B.R Sen's recommendations would have been implemented and the death toll would have been much less. Sadly, both the Muslim League as well as the other popular Muslim leader, Fazl ul Haq, were committed to the creation of Pakistan. This was based on the 'two nation' theory which in turn was based on the notion that Muslims have a duty to leave a place where the government is not Islamic and to settle in a place where the Government is committed to implementing Islamic political and juristic ideas.
Sen writes-
A ferocious world war was going on, the eastern front of which was moving closer and closer to us. But India’s problems were not only of external origin. There were politically cultivated tensions between Hindus and Muslims.
However, these only existed because of religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims. The fact is Islam considers polytheism and idolatry and women not wearing hijab and men not keeping beards and so forth to be highly objectionable. This has now become obvious to the whole world. Sen however prefers to think that Hindus and Muslims were great pals and all the problems were caused by a few politicians. Yet Tagore himself had warned that the Hindus in East Bengal would be massacred by the Muslims once the Brits left. Indeed, his grandfather had lobbied Westminster to lift restrictions on European settlement in Bengal because only the Brits could defend the Hindu from the Muslim.
And on top of that there were rapidly rising food prices; the intense hardship they caused was a subject of constant conversation in many — I imagine most — homes in Bengal.
When prices rise, people ask 'has the supply gone down, or is this a case of hoarding by speculators'. Sen must have overheard conversations confirming that the harvest had, indeed, been bad and, on top of that, there had been a complete disruption of imports etc.
All these problems and concerns worried my grandparents with whom I was living, and also our relations, including of course my own parents, who would visit us frequently in Santiniketan. When I went to Dhaka in the school vacations to be with them, I found the state of anxiety there to be even more palpable.
It had become apparent that the Hindus would be driven out of Dacca. Some may have hoped that Netaji Bose and his Japanese chums would protect them. But, it was a forlorn hope. The Japanese created famines wherever they went. B.R Sen and the FAO did a lot to exorcise the specter of famine. A.K. Sen, however, developed a theory of famine whose great utility was that it could create starvation even where food was in plentiful supply. This is because 'exchange entitlements' aren't things you can actually eat. Food has to be delivered to you or else you may starve. In Bengal, the Indian Famine Code could have been implemented in 1942 itself because ICS officers like B.R Sen had observed the warning signs. It was because the elected Government refused to do so that there was an 'entitlements collapse'.
No comments:
Post a Comment