Churchill's Secret War (43 page)

In the end, the vast majority of victims in Noakhali were not landowners but villagers of the lowest castes—people who had also suffered grievously from famine, as well as from forced evacuations, rape, and other depredations by Allied forces stationed in the region.

AT THE TIME of the strife in Noakhali, Ashoka Gupta was living in Chittagong. The famine had changed her life, turning her gaze out of the home and onto the world beyond. The joy she derived from saving a child by giving her food and shelter and “bringing back a smile to her lips” was more than she had ever obtained from attending to her household chores. When the pogrom in Noakhali began, she resolved—with the help of the All India Women’s Conference—to help the afflicted villagers, and in particular to rescue violated women and girls, who were being rejected by their own families after assaults by Muslim men.
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Gandhi arrived soon after in Noakhali, in the hope of bringing calm by trekking from village to charred village. Discouraged by the vastness of her task, Gupta went with a friend to seek his advice and found him living in a burned-down house. Gandhi was in agony; everything to which he had dedicated his life was falling apart. That religion should be used in service of violence appalled him and challenged the very foundation of his creed. But none of this turmoil was visible to Gupta. To the two women, Gandhi said that it was not enough to visit the ravaged areas: they would have to reside there. “Only if we ourselves had the courage to face the dangers of the situation, and lived continuously in the villages over an extended period of time, would the local people be assured about our commitment and return to live in their own homes,” Gupta recalled him saying. “For courage, like fear, was contagious. Just a single example of a courageous deed would act like a beacon of hope and would arouse the bravery and the self-confidence of the local people.”
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With a toddler in her arms, Gupta made a home in the terrifying ghostly hulk of what once had been a peaceable fishing village. Slowly the killings died down—but things never did return to normal. One young woman confided that she was being taken away every night by gangsters, raped, and returned the next morning to her husband. The couple dared not complain to the police for fear of reprisals.
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NOTHING COULD HUSH the screams that emanated from Noakhali. The outflow of terror-stricken refugees, spreading across Bengal
and into Bihar in a desperate search for safety, convinced many Hindus that they could no longer coexist with Muslims. Wealthy Bengalis of both faiths began to pack up and migrate to the regions where they would be in a majority.

The pogroms of Noakhali sparked even more horrific retributions in Bihar, where Hindu landowners organized mobs to butcher poor Muslims. The toll would reach 20,000. Viceroy Wavell turned down legislators’ pleas that killer mobs in Bihar be strafed by military aircraft. “Machine-gunning from the air is not a weapon one would willingly use,” he noted in his diary, “though the Muslims point out, rather embarrassingly, that we did not hesitate to use it in 1942.” As recently as July 1946, Wavell had ordered the destruction by bombing of villages in the North West Frontier Province—because some tribesmen had kidnapped a British consul. Compared with his resolve when imperial interests were at stake, the viceroy responded mildly to the far more lethal internecine riots. The director of the Intelligence Bureau had urged that the massacres not provoke the authorities “into action which would reintroduce anti-British agitation.” If anything, he added, the religious warfare had its uses, being “a natural, if ghastly, process tending in its own way to the solution of the Indian problem.”
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Imperial troops should stand aloof, warned the leader of the British opposition, Winston Churchill, and not become the “agencies and instruments of enforcing caste Hindu domination upon the 90 million Muslims and the 60 million Untouchables.”
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A COLLECTION OF war-related factors had unleashed violence of a kind that India had not witnessed since 1857. But this time, Hindus and Muslims were fighting one another instead of a common enemy and, after almost a thousand years of cohabitation, could no longer see how to live together. Both independence and partition became inevitable, and were scheduled for August 15, 1947.

Gandhi arrived in Calcutta a week before that date and moved into a vacant house with Suhrawardy (who had had a change of heart) in order to symbolize reconciliation. The Muslims of Calcutta were greatly
outnumbered by Hindus and had asked Gandhi to stay in the city, so fearful were they of being attacked; and in return, Gandhi had asked Suhrawardy to ensure that the people of Noakhali would be safe. That region did remain fairly quiet at this time—a hint of the influence that politicians could wield when they so chose. But in the city the killings went on and on, and a desperate Gandhi began a fast that he intended to end through death. “If the riots continue what will I do by merely being alive?” he asked in anguish. “If I lack even the power to pacify the people, what else is left for me to do?”
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Over the next days, as Gandhi began to waste away, the massacres came to a halt—amazingly, not even murderers wanted
his
blood on their hands. The weary leader was persuaded to stop fasting. “He was now a broken man, lost, his faith in human beings destroyed,” mourned Gupta, who witnessed the old man’s torment. Gandhi never did celebrate the independence of India, which bore no resemblance to the idyll of freedom and fellowship to which he had dedicated his life. Instead he left for the Punjab, where the slaughter had reached a staggering scale, hoping to diminish the violence there.
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Although India and Pakistan had just been born, in part by dividing the provinces of Bengal and Punjab, the exact borders between the nations had not been announced. As a result, blood-crazed men sought to separate the Siamese twins by slashing at the flesh that held them together. The gutters of cities ran red, murder and rapine emptied entire districts, and trainloads of refugees became trainloads of corpses. The carnage was much the worse in the northwest of the subcontinent because this region was home to hundreds of thousands of demobilized soldiers. Bands of infantrymen, trained and brutalized by participation in a world war, regrouped into the same clans in which they had earlier fought. (The Indian Army used kinship ties to foster loyalty, with blood relatives assigned to the same platoon and men from the same village joining the same battalion.) They took the machine guns, rifles, hand grenades, bombs, mortars, signaling systems, and other contemporary technology of warfare they had picked up in distant deserts and jungles
and turned them upon their neighbors. Some even donned their former khaki or olive uniforms. At least 1 million people were killed and 10 to 15 million displaced.
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“The fearful massacres which are occurring in India are no surprise to me,” Churchill declaimed in September 1947. “We are, of course, only at the beginning of these horrors and butcheries, perpetrated upon one another, with the ferocity of cannibals, by the races gifted with capacities for the highest culture, and who had for generations dwelt, side by side, in general peace, under the broad, tolerant and impartial rule of the British Crown and Parliament. I cannot but doubt that the future will witness a vast abridgement of the population throughout what has, for sixty or seventy years been the most peaceful part of the world and that, at the same time, will come a retrogression of civilization throughout these enormous regions, constituting one of the most melancholy tragedies that Asia has ever known.”
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Some time after elections had removed him from power, Churchill had initiated a covert correspondence with Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Speculation abounds as to the contents of the communications between the two men. In one missive dated August 3, 1946—two weeks before the carnage on Direct Action Day—Churchill appears to have suggested that Pakistan could in future invade a defenseless India. But since very few of these letters have been found, and because Jinnah left virtually no record of his personal reflections, the extent to which Churchill had continued to influence events in India cannot be properly gauged. Yet even without the evidence the letters might provide, there can be no doubt that if someone more sympathetic to Indians had been prime minister during the war years—someone less inclined to derail the independence movement by any means possible, whether through incarcerating nationalists or inciting separatists or tolerating starvation—the colony’s freedom would have been attained with far more modest loss of life.
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So it was that the sun set on the British Empire. Turning their backs on a horizon red with flame and blood, Britannica’s soldiers trudged toward the ships that would carry them home, some marching to this chant:
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On January 30, 1948, a Hindu fanatic shot Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi dead during an open-air prayer meeting in Delhi.

I
n 1947, Winston Churchill hired a team of researchers and ghost-writers to formulate the definitive history of World War II. As historian David Reynolds has detailed, the treatise was in actuality a memoir of epic proportions, one in which fact often fell victim to selective memory. When Churchill read out loud parts of the history he was writing, Lord Moran, who remembered the events differently, would wonder, “Could it be that he had come to believe what he wanted to believe?” The Bengal famine received but fleeting mention, in a document that happened to make it into an appendix. Despite their distortions, the six massive volumes became the primary reference for a generation of historians—which may explain why the famine is almost totally absent from the tens of thousands of tomes since written about the war.
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Behind the scenes, Leopold Amery had done his best to ensure that all the blame for the calamity would fall within India. In late 1943, Viceroy Wavell had faced a vociferous demand from Bengal’s politicians for an enquiry into the famine. The secretary of state for India had advised against any “definite commitment” to that end. When it became impossible to stave off the inquiry, he had helped the viceroy select the members of the famine commission and to impose “specific limitations of kinds of topic which the enquiry is permitted to consider.” These would include an avoidance of “strategical and other circumstances as may have contributed to internal transportation difficulties or affected H.M.G.’s decisions in regard to shipping of imports.” Nor
was the commission permitted to summon testimonies from anyone who had since left India (such as Linlithgow).
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So it was that the famine commission, which began its secret hearings in July 1944, would elucidate all the local factors that had led to the catastrophe—and avoid every lead that pointed back to London. For instance, although the commission deplored the policy of food and boat denial, it heard nothing about scorched earth orders issued by the War Cabinet. The commission also left the impression that only imports of rice, not wheat, would have broken the famine, which was far from having been the case. Nor did it discuss any of the international offers of aid that were rejected.
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Hints of a cover-up abound. Amery’s diaries do not contain any mention of scorched earth, and his papers are missing the pertinent correspondence with India. The testimonies submitted to the famine commission were reportedly to have been destroyed (except for one copy that survived as the Nanavati Papers). Civil servant Leonard G. Pinnell stated in his unpublished memoir that he had retained his own set of testimonies, but its location is unknown. The unpublished memoir of civil servant Olaf Martin, written some time after the war, is missing pages that appear to have dealt with his refusal to serve as chief secretary of Bengal. “At that time I had to be careful what I said,” Martin recalled of 1943, “just as, at present, I have to be careful what I write.”
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At least one India Office file, on rice exports to Ceylon, has been destroyed and another one, on Canada’s offer of wheat for Bengal, is missing. No figures could be located for rice exports from India in the fiscal year 1943–1944. In the minutes of a meeting of the Chiefs of Staff, available on microfilm at the National Archives of the United Kingdom, a section dealing with shipping to India is blacked out. The cabinet secretaries’ notes on War Cabinet discussions, which were released in January 2006, stop abruptly in mid-1943—just before Churchill, Cherwell, Leathers, and Grigg made their August decision to deny relief to famine-stricken Bengal. Among the papers of Lawrence Burgis, who informally transcribed War Cabinet meetings, no notes on India are available for August 4, 1944, when Churchill’s tirade on the colony induced Amery
to compare him with Hitler, but other discussions on that date are recorded. References to Subhas Chandra Bose are conspicuous by their absence in War Cabinet minutes, although the assassination order shows how seriously he was taken as an enemy.
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IT ALSO APPEARS that the famine commission suppressed the results of a government-sponsored survey on famine mortality. Instead, it provided its own estimate of the death toll—a figure that remains controversial to this day. The public health department had recorded 1,873,749 deaths during 1943. Subtracting from this total the average number of deaths per year (as recorded during the preceding five years), the commission got 688,846 excess deaths during the famine year.
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This count, the commission noted, did not include those who had died on the roads or in distant towns during their search for food. The death registration figures were highly unreliable for another reason, however: in Bengal the usually illiterate village chowkidar collected all such information. One observer had commented that officials of the Government of India were “very keen on amassing statistics—they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the
Chowkydar
(village watchman), who just puts down what he damn pleases.” Even in normal times, a discrepancy of 30 percent showed up between death statistics collected by the chowkidar and the more reliable figures compiled during decennial census operations.
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