Madhushree drew Sen's ire by the following passage from a letter she sent the NYT
In his review of my book, Churchill’s Secret War [NYR, December 23, 2010], Joseph Lelyveld notes that I do not discuss Amartya Sen’s assertion that Bengal contained enough grain to ward off famine.
If this were the case, Churchill could not have secretly starved the Bengalis.
I avoided this aspect of Sen’s work because his conclusion of sufficiency in Bengal has been seriously challenged.
They were nonsense. If Bengal had a bumper crop in 1943, food prices would have fallen because the demand for food is inelastic. The Government, or charities, could have easily procured food and opened 'langars' (soup kitchens).
Historian Mark Tauger has shown that Sen based his crop estimates on projections,
made up figures. Ian Stephenson, in his book Monsoon Mornings, explains why everybody in Bengal knew the official figures were made up.
and that crop diseases spread by wet weather appear to have drastically reduced the actual harvest. The notes in my book contain a number of different estimates of the crop shortage, all of which are substantial. Furthermore, in his paper Sen misquoted the government’s estimate of the rice shortfall as a mere 140,000 tons (instead of the 1.4 million tons stated in the document he cites)—which led him to mistakenly claim that the authorities could not have predicted famine.
Sen’s insight that loss of entitlement provides a deeper explanation for famine remains true and profound,
It was nonsense. People had an entitlement to food. The Government was corrupt and incompetent and thus there was entitlement failure. Otherwise, just by getting arrested, everybody would have been getting three square meals a day. Sadly, there wasn't enough food.
however. My work shows that the concept can be extended to include the far larger entitlement of British citizens than of colonial subjects to food—as illustrated by several of Churchill’s decisions.
Gandhi was just as much a British subject as Churchill. The word 'citizen' was only used after Labour came to power.
British people in the UK had good leaders who ensured they got enough food to eat. Some poor Bengali people in Bengal did not get enough food because they had shitty leaders.
Amartya Sen replied thus-
Madhusree Mukerjee seems satisfied with little information.
She has more than Sen did.
Mark Tauger’s data come from exactly two “rice research stations” from two districts in undivided Bengal,
Whereas Sen comes from zero stations (though he tries to make out Sriniketan was some such thing)
which had twenty-seven districts.
If rice output really had gone up, as Sen claims, the price would have fallen. But it fell. Thus Sen is wrong.
Since weather variations have regionally diverse effects, it would require more than this to “seriously challenge” the analysis I made, using data from all districts,
all of that data was made up as Ian Stephens had remarked. This was known to everybody- including Sen's daddy and uncle and B.R Sen and Mahalanobis etc. Suppose Sen is right and there was more food in 1943 than in 1941, why did the price rise rather than fall? Economists all around the world would have been studying this question.
which indicated that food availability in 1943 (the famine year) was significantly higher than in 1941 (when there was no famine).
Sen had met Ian Stephens. Did he not read his book? How could a Bengali who did his first degree in Bengal not know that Bengali food statistics were made up?
Ignoring the range of data I used in my study,
Sen claimed that some notebooks kept at Sriniketan showed there was plenty of food. But Sriniketan was a charity. It didn't sell food at the market price.
she misdescribes my estimates as being based only “on projections.”
They were based on made up figures.
On the other point mentioned by Mukerjee, she makes a story out of a typo in my quotation from a statement of the secretary of state for India, omitting to mention that the typo has not the slightest bearing on my assessment of the food situation.
So much the worse for Sen. The Government says there is a shortfall. Everybody else agrees there is a shortfall. Only Sen says there was more food, not less.
Moreover, even a “shortage” of 1.4 million tons is a small proportion of the total crop of “60/70 million tons” (as the secretary of state mentioned).
A two percent fall in the supply of food is likely to cause at least a 4 to 10 percent rise in price because food is inelastic in demand. This assumes the food market clears which does not happen where food is requisitioned and supplied at one price to some with others being left at the mercy of the black market (assuming there are 'market makers' accessible to them).
The confounding issue, of course, is the idea of “shortage” itself, as Lelyveld has noted.
It isn't confounding at all. Was there more food? No. Was there corruption? Yes. This meant that the public distribution system faced a massive shortage- i.e. could not get enough food to discharge its obligations. This is why the Mayor of Calcutta wrote to the American President asking for food shipments.
There was indeed a substantial shortfall compared with demand, hugely enhanced in a war economy, as I have described in detail, but that is quite different from a shortfall of supply compared with supply in previous years.
No. It is exactly the same thing. There was less food in Bengal in 1943 compared to 1941.
Mukerjee seems to miss this crucial distinction,
It is a figment of Sen's imagination
and in her single-minded, if understandable, attempt to nail down Churchill,
If Bengal had more food in 1943 than in 1941 then Churchill would have been highly irresponsible if he sent food to Calcutta. Why? He would have crashed the price and ruined the hardworking farmer.
she ends up absolving British imperial policy of confusion and callousness, which had disastrous consequences.
How could it have disastrous consequences? The Bengalis were an agricultural people. If they had more food in 1943 than in 1941, they had less, not more, need for food shipments.
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