by LAKSHMI MANI
CHURCHILL’S SECRET WAR By Madhusree Mukerjee. Basic Books, New York. August, 2010. Hardcover. 368 pages. $28.95
Secret War casts Winston Churchill as one of the principal architects of the “divide and rule” policy that led to the partition of the Indian sub-continent. While Churchill may have been a hero to westerners because of his brilliant war strategy during World War II, in Secret War he comes across as a callous racist, obsessed about winning the war at any cost. Indians were useful to him only as cannon fodder for World War II and as producers of grain and military supplies for Britain’s war. Churchill was influenced by Malthus and the Darwinian doctrine of the survival of the fittest. His beliefs led him to withhold food supplies from the starving populace and ship grain produced by Indian farmers to feed the British and their European allies during the war. Mukherjee meticulously records Churchill’s scorched earth policy of destroying industrial facilities and burning down rice supplies to prevent the Japanese takeover of the eastern seaboard of India, and the denial policy of confiscating all forms of transportation, which made it impossible for people in Bengal to get even minimal supplies of food grains. The irony was that the people in this province, a major producer of rice, were given as little as 400 calories a day, the amount that the inmates of Buchenwald received in the concentration camps at that time. Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi recalled that it was routine to see “dead people being picked up in government trucks, tossed in like logs. She also heard “[the dead] were being burnt in furnaces of factories.” Shades of Auschwitz and other Nazi atrocities come to mind.
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(Thanks to reader)