War hero Churchill failed India's starving millions

History, Winston Churchill said, "will judge me kindly, because I intend to write it myself." He needn't have bothered. Of the great mass murderers of the 20th century, he is the only one to have completely escaped the odium deservingly bestowed on his rivals Hitler and Stalin, to have been crowned with a Nobel Prize (for Literature, no less), and now even with an Oscar.
As Hollywood confirms, Churchill's reputation as what Harold Evans has called "the British Lionheart on the ramparts of civilisation" rests almost entirely on his stirring rhetoric during World War II. Churchill had nothing to offer but "blood, toil, tears and sweat". And, of course, an exceptional talent for a fine phrase. "We shall not flag nor fail. We shall go on to the end.... We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the landing grounds, we shall fight them in the fields.... We shall never surrender." (The revisionist British historian John Charmley dismissed this as 'sublime nonsense'.)
And what phrases he came up with! "You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us.... You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival." That victory, as Charmley has pointed out, resulted in the dissolution of the British Empire, and more immediately, in Churchill's own defenestration by the war-weary British electorate in the elections of 1945.
No wonder that not everyone was equally impressed by his oratory. The Australian PM Robert Menzies remarked of Churchill during WWII: "His real tyrant is the glittering phrase, so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way."
Indeed, the 'glittering phrase' was always Churchill's strongest suit. He never flinched from bombast: "Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour'." Such extravagant oratory helped steel the British at a time of great adversity, but their effect was only of the moment. Yet Churchill believed that 'Words are the only things which last forever'. The hagiology from which he has benefited in recent years suggests that he may well have been right.
For words, in the end, are all that Churchill admirers can point to. Actions are another matter altogether. Books and cinema have assiduously built up the image of Churchill the defiant bulldog who kept the British in WWII when so many of the establishment wanted peace, and Churchill the parliamentarian of rapier wit who dominated its politics at a time when Britain was the epicentre of a worldwide empire. Less well-known is the brash political upstart whose arrogance in cabinet meetings prompted Charles Hobhouse, postmaster general during WWI, to describe him as 'ill-mannered, boastful, unprincipled and without any redeeming features'. The vaingloriously self-serving but elegant volumes he authored on WWII led the Nobel Committee, unable in all conscience to give him an award for peace, to grant him, astonishingly enough, the Nobel Prize for Literature- an unwitting tribute to the fictional qualities inherent in Churchill's self-justifying embellishments.
Churchill's wartime philosophy was simple: he would exterminate the Japanese, bomb the Germans into the ground, and starve the Indians to death. Thanks to Churchill's personal decisions, some four million Bengalis died of hunger in a 1943 famine. Churchill deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles in Greece and elsewhere.
'The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious' than that of 'sturdy Greeks', he argued. Grain for the Tommies, bread for home consumption in Britain (27 million tonnes of imported grains, a wildly excessive target), and generous buffer stocks in Europe (for yet-to-be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs) were Churchill's priorities, not the life or death of his Indian subjects. When reminded of the suffering of his victims, his response was typically Churchillian: the famine was the Indians' own fault, he said, for 'breeding like rabbits'.
As Madhusree Mukerjee's richly documented account of the Bengal Famine, Churchill's Secret War, demonstrates, India's own surplus foodgrains were exported to Ceylon; Australian wheat was sent sailing past the Indian port of Calcutta (where the bodies of those who had died of starvation littered the streets) to storage depots in the Mediterranean and the Balkans to create stockpiles that could ease the pressure on post-war Britain, and offers of American and Canadian food aid were turned down. The colony was not permitted to spend its own sterling reserves, or indeed use its own ships, to import food. Even the laws of supply and demand couldn't help: in order to ensure supplies for its troops elsewhere, the British government paid inflated prices for grain in the Indian open market, thereby making it unaffordable for ordinary Indians. When officers of conscience pointed out in a telegram to the prime minister the scale of the tragedy caused by his decisions, Churchill's only reaction was peevishly to ask the Viceroy, Lord Wavell: 'Why hasn't Gandhi died yet?'
This year's Oscar rewards yet another hagiography of this odious man. To the Iraqis whom Churchill gassed, the Greek protestors on the streets of Athens who were moved down on Churchill's orders in 1944 (killing 28 and maiming 120), sundry Pashtuns and Irish, or the brave ANZACS who died unnecessary deaths in Gallipoli because of Churchill's folly, to Afghans and Kenyans and Welsh miners as well as to Indians like myself, it will always be a mystery why a few bombastic speeches have been enough to wash the bloodstains off Winston Churchill's racist hands. The rest of us will remember him as a war criminal and an enemy of decency and humanity, a blinkered imperialist untroubled by the oppression of non-White peoples, a man who fought to deny us freedom.
- Open magazine
Shashi Tharoor is a member of Indian Parliament and the author, most recently, of Why I am a Hindu