Why has so much nonsense been written about the Bengal, as opposed to the Bangladesh, famine? The answer is that Hindu buddhijivis like telling stupid lies. This has created an academic availability cascade which attracts stupid White peeps.
A case in point is Benjamin Robert Siegel who writes in 'Hungry Nation'
Yet the thundering of provincial politics in Bengal belied the fact that the preponderance of political power in India rested with the colonial Indian administration.
Which, in Bengal had been wholly under the control of elected Bengali politicians since 1937. Food was purely a Provincial subject. The Center had little power because Indian politicians could not agree to pool power in a Federal Government at the Center. This meant it was very difficult for the Viceroy to get food surplus states to export to food deficit states or to prevent each Province from engaging in beggar my neighbor policies by seeking to bring in grain but refusing to release it.
However, at the root of the problem was Burma's decision to go its own way in 1937. It was the big Rice exporter. The Japanese conquest of Burma made a food availability deficit in Bengal inevitable. However the corruption and incompetence of elected Bengali- mainly Muslim- politicians caused disproportionate excess mortality relative to other food deficit areas.
This was obvious to Bengali administrators and politicians at the time. The Bangladesh famine, where once again the transition to Democracy caused excess mortality, made it crystal clear exactly where the blame lay. Bangladeshis don't bother writing about this. They have shifted rural girls into big factory dormitories and thus have overtaken Pakistan, and parts of India, in terms of per capita Income. Sri Lanka has four times its income but its corrupt and incompetent politicians have brought that country to its knees economically speaking. Bangladesh however continues to grow by doing sensible things and working hard.
Siegel is extraordinarily ignorant of India-
India’s “Governors- General” managed the province from New Delhi,
The Viceroy was in Delhi. Bengal's Governor was in Calcutta. But the administration was in the hands of the elected Premier- who was brown, not White.
cooled by wooden fans in the sprawling South Block of the Secretariat Building. In Calcutta, shielded by the whitewashed balustrades and Cuban palms of Government House, the Conservative parliamentarian John Herbert
who was wholly unremarkable. He knew nothing about India. He didn't need to. The administration was in the hands of elected Bengalis who were supposed to be very clever. The higher ranks of the Civil Service too had been Indianized. The Brits thought that the Governor's job would be ceremonial- a bit like a Lord Lieutenant of an English County.
oversaw provincial machinations from a velvet divan, before his death from appendicitis saw him replaced by the Australian politician Richard Casey .
Australia wanted to sell wheat to India.
Clad in wing collars and harlequin insignias, these men presided confidently over the complete collapse of Bengal’s food position.
No. Guys with typical English names like Fazl ul Haq, Shurawardy and Nazimuddin presided profitably over the Bengal's misery. But the Ispahanis- another fine old English name!- profited even more greatly by it. They gave a lot of money to the Muslim League.
The spindly casuarina trees fringing the Bengal coast did little to impede the ferocious cyclone that made landfall near the village of Contai in October 1942. Tens of thousands of residents of Midnapore district died in a region already wracked by political disorder: many of the district’s police stations had been burnt down, and thousands of jailed activists watched the storm from their prison cells. The enterprising civil servant B.R. Sen ,
Who was Relief Commissioner, Bengal, from 1942 to 1943 before being promoted to being India's Director-General of Food from 1943 to 1946. This was because he was actually a White aristocrat. Binoy Ranjan is a typical upper class English name.
later Director- General of the Food and Agriculture Organization, watched the storm from his verandah in Calcutta. Days later, he was surveying the remains of villages which had been washed away in preparation for relief efforts, in defiance of a District Officer
who was a Bengali Muslim who supported the Muslim League. He was delighted that Congress supporting Hindus were dying in his District. B.R Sen wanted the Ministry of Finance under a Hindu to take charge of Famine Relief. But Shurawardy, as Minister of Supply, got control of the whole operation. He enriched Muslim League supporting entrepreneurs- the Ipsahanis in particular- while blaming Hindu banias for hoarding food.
who gloated that the unruly province had received what it deserved.
In 1946, Shurawardy, as Premier of Bengal, declared 'Direct Action Day' so that Hindus would get what they deserved. Sadly, Hindus retaliated quickly in Calcutta which is why it remained part of India.
Siegel mentions a British civil servant who had risen in the Dept. of Agriculture- Sir Henry Leon French who was sent to India to confirm the country as a whole had a food deficit and thus should qualify for American food aid.
French’s host in India was B.R. Sen , India’s new Director of Food, who had replaced the much- reviled civil servant J.P. Srivastava . Both Sen and Srivastava were members of the Indian Administrative Service, yet while Sen had done his best to procure relief, Srivastava had been lamentably tone- deaf.
This is extraordinarily ignorant. Sen was a Bengali ICS officer but Srivastava was a businessman politician from U.P. He was the Member of the Viceroy's Council with responsibility for Food from 1943 to 1946. But he had little power because Food was a State, not Federal, subject.
“Sometimes,” he had mused in the Central Assembly in the midst of the famine, “I wonder whether we devoted sufficient attention in the past to the food problem of the country.”
This was perfectly true. Curzon had an American pal who gave a lot of money in 1905 to found what became the Indian Agricultural Institute. Some Indians- including Tagore- tried something similar on a smaller scale. But most Indian politicians weren't interested in this sort of thing. They preferred to talk bollocks. After independence this meant biting the American hand which kept India from starvation.
Traveling with Sen through Punjab, Bengal, and Bombay, French frequently clashed with the press.
Which was as shit then as it is today. The fact is British civil servants had no knowledge or obligation to acquire knowledge about India. Britain was a separate Kingdom. India was an Empire. The link between the two was through the Crown. Westminster had handed over control of food to elected Indians in the 1935 Act. Yet, the Press pretended Whitey had stolen food from starving Bengalis.
In Delhi, he deflected questions about the comparative toll of the war in Britain and India.
Britain got bombed a lot. India didn't. British and American troops had saved India from Japanese conquest. India's position in terms of food security and defence and Indians not getting killed because of their religion would greatly decline. That's why far more people from the sub-continent flooded into the UK to settle than there had been Britishers at any time in India. The Brits had learned how to do sensible things which involved raising productivity. The Indians had only learned to talk incessant bollocks.
At a press conference held in the Punjab Secretariat in Lahore, French grew angry at reporters who ignored his plea to avoid “political” subjects.
The guy was a Civil Servant. He wasn't allowed to speak on 'political' subjects.
He returned to London to present his grim findings at the India Office: India, he declared, stood no chance at becoming self- sufficient in food in anything less than four or five years.
Which is why begging bowl diplomacy started even before Independence. Nehru had to go along with that humiliating exercise. Telling Whitey to fuck off feels good. Pleading with Whitey to feed an almost wholly agricultural nation feels fucking horrible.
The British claim to just rule and the promotion of welfare through food had advanced haltingly throughout the first decades of the twentieth century.
Famine had been conquered. But malnutrition remained. Still the Brits thought that Indians would do a good job once they took over this responsibility in 1937. In Bengal, they didn't do a good job at all. Sad.
Yet colonial administrators, aware the famine had brought concerns of sustenance to the fore, had scrambled to make a belated case.
A bureaucrat is afraid of getting the blame for having callously presided over a famine. Politicians- e.g. Shurawardy- can get elected Prime Minister if they preside over a famine and blame people of a different religion for 'hoarding' provided their own financial supporters get rich in the process.
In July 1943, the Department of Food had assembled a Foodgrains Policy Committee , charging it with devising measures to increase food supplies. Towards the end of the year, the government had enlisted the help of A.V. Hill , an economist at the Royal Society, to help develop a “food plan for India.” The Director of Food J.P. Srivastava ,
He was the Food Member of the Viceroy's Council- i.e. the equivalent of Food Minister at the Centre.
cheering these moves as proof of the colonial administration’s good intentions, vowed that New Delhi’s task was now not only one of feeding four hundred million of our countrymen, but also of providing the supplies to do so for millions of small cultivators and seeing that they pass without being hoarded to the public.
The Central Government had limited powers. The hope was that the Provinces would cooperate. But, because Indians had refused to pool enough power at the center, little could be done. However, it was the Muslim threat, not the Famine threat, which caused Hindu India to opt for a strong center and a unitary rather than federal constitution.
Stung by the belief that the British had starved Bengal,
Why didn't they starve Bihar or UP? Bengal was loyal. Congress ruled states were not.
the Departments of Food and Agriculture drafted a new joint policy in 1945. Food would remain a provincial concern, their statement affirmed, but the Departments in Delhi would work to “promote the welfare of the people and to secure a progressive improvement of their standard of living. This includes the responsibility for providing enough food for all, sufficient in quantity and of requisite quality.”
By begging from Amrika. Previously, Whites had to actually go to the subcontinent to rule it. Now Pakistan and India and Sri Lanka could be kept on a leash by a threat not to send PL480 shipments. It wasn't till the mid-Sixties that the Indian Government finally resolved to become self-sufficient in food. This meant disintermediating the gobshites and permitting the rise of a 'kulak' class much to the horror of the Commie nutters.
The reason the Left loved Famines was they wanted to collectivize the Land the way the Bolsheviks had done. They then realized that the Army recruited the sons of 'kulaks'. Also peasants really like killing Reds. They did it with vim and vigour in Malaya and then, in Indonesia, Hindus and Muslims united to completely exterminate them.
Indian gobshites had liked accusing posh White peeps of being beastly. But the people they truly hated was the 'educationally backward' peasant castes who, once they could rise a little through agriculture, asserted and then attained dominance. There was a reason the gobshites wanted to keep both agricultural and industrial productivity low. They quoted Gramsci but were terrified of 'organic intellectuals' from either the peasantry or the proletariat. If those classes rise economically, the bogus Lefties from the traditional clerisy would have to serve darker skinned, more rustic, masters. Better to seek intellectual coolie work on some Western campus, enabling cretins to get credentials, than to seek for relevance in India by kowtowing to Yadavs or Nadars or Patels or Jats or what have you.
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