Bengal 1943 and famine and Churchill?

Bengal: 5,000,000 (??) dead

In 1943, at the height of World War II, with Japan closing in on Southeast Asia, Bengal's British rulers decided to divert the nearly two million tonnes of grain and rice imported annually from rural Bengal to industrial centres such as Calcutta, and to Britain's soldiers on the various fronts. Bengalis without land were the first to feel the brunt. As rice prices spiralled, multiplying fourfold between March and October that year, people could no longer afford food. Tens of thousands abandoned the countryside to make for Calcutta, only to be forcibly removed by the occupying British. Although America and Canada both offered aid, they were rejected by a Churchill government presumably more concerned about its domestic standing than with saving lives in a distant colony. Estimated deaths run up to five million.

http://www.i-eatsite.com/en/07ce/ce_cont_top_hungry.html

http://www.vho.org/tr/2003/1/Pfitzner71-75.html

Winston Churchill's famous remark about the 1943 Bengal famine—that it was caused by the tendency of the people to breed like rabbits—belongs to this general tradition of blaming the colonial subject.

As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen explains in his now well-known theory of entitlements, the Bengal famine was not the result of a drastic slump in food production but because the colonial masters had diverted food for other commercial purposes.

http://www.dsharma.org/hunger/famine.htm

 

Just to remind that war can be awful to civils,too. Also mentioned in the book " Britain´s war machine" by David Edgerton.

 

And no doubt people will still be making political capital out of it in 160 years like the Irish potato famine.