Churchill's Secret War Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue:

  CHAPTER ONE - Empire at War

  CHAPTER TWO - Harvesting the Colonies

  CHAPTER THREE - Scorched

  CHAPTER FOUR - At Any Price

  CHAPTER FIVE - Death of a Thousand Cuts

  CHAPTER SIX - An Occupied and Starving Country

  CHAPTER SEVEN - In the Village

  CHAPTER EIGHT - On the Street

  CHAPTER NINE - Run Rabbit Run

  CHAPTER TEN - Life After Death

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Split and Quit

  CHAPTER TWELVE - The Reckoning

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Copyright Page

  To those who fell

  so that I could be born free

  Prologue:

  Our Title to India

  “No great portion of the world population was so effectively pro tected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the peoples of Hindustan,” Winston Churchill wrote in his 1950 history of the twentieth century’s most lethal conflict. “They were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small Island.” By Hindustan, or Land of the Hindus, Churchill meant India, which during the war was part of the British Empire. Britain’s wartime prime minister did not discuss in his six-volume account the 1943 famine in the eastern Indian province of Bengal, which killed 1.5 million people by the official estimate and 3 million by most others. One primary cause of the famine was the extent to which Churchill and his advisers chose to use the resources of India to wage war against Germany and Japan, causing scarcity and inflation within the colony. In 1947, two years after the war ended, India attained independence—in part because the deprivation and anarchy of that fractious era had torn the fabric of its society and were erupting in violence that the United Kingdom could no longer subdue. Yet Churchill’s efforts to retain the colony by means of divide and rule also contributed to its partition, and to the eventual establishment of the mutually antagonistic nations India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.1

  If the famine garnered little attention not just from Churchill but from twentieth-century historians, it also occasioned scant surprise, because Bengal had long been synonymous with hunger. Its modern incarnations, Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal in India, rank among the poorest regions of the world: Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. secretary of state, once described Bangladesh as a “basket case.” For two and a half centuries, the history of Bengal—which is in miniature the history of India itself—has featured relentless poverty. But before 1757, when General Robert Clive founded the British Empire by conquering Bengal, it was one of the richest parts of the world: “the paradise of the earth,” as Clive himself described it.2

  Just as British sovereignty over India ended with a famine in Bengal, it began with one. The famine of 1770 set the stage not only for the British Raj (as the imperial era in India would eventually be called) and the chain of famines that occurred throughout that reign but also, ultimately, for the emergence of impoverished and strife-torn South Asia.

  IN LATE 1665, traveling eastward from the Mughal court in Delhi, physician François Bernier arrived in Bengal to find a vast, populous delta, its myriad channels lined with vibrant towns and cities interspersed with fields of rice, sugar, corn, vegetables, mustard, and sesame. He declared it “the finest and most fruitful country in the world.” Foreign merchants worked the wholesale markets, offering to buy produce in exchange for silver. They could not trade goods with the native businessmen, because Bengal was in need of virtually nothing. Its rice traveled to Sri Lanka (called Ceylon by the British) and the Maldives, its sugar to Arabia and Mesopotamia, and its silks to Europe; ships at its ports were loaded with such exports as wheat biscuits and salted meats, opium, varnish, wax, musk, spices, preserved fruits, and clarified butter. Bengal’s cottons, which supplied much of the world, were astonishing in variety and quality: twenty yards of a delicate muslin could be stuffed into a snuffbox. One can only imagine for what sublime piece of fabric another seventeenth-century visitor, Mirza Nathan, paid 4,000 rupees, given that a single rupee bought a score of chickens.3

  Bengali merchants, whose ships plied south to Sri Lanka and west to Gujarat, ate from gold plates and wore intricately wrought brocade clothing and gem-studded gold jewelry. Nor were the lowly in want of shelter or food. “The three or four sorts of vegetables which, together with rice and butter, form the chief food of the common people, are purchased for the merest trifle,” Bernier attested. Fish and meat were so plentiful, he added, that the region’s many Portuguese immigrants virtually lived on pork. “Bengale abounds with every necessary of life,” he wrote, concluding with a wink: “[t]he rich exuberance of the country, together with the beauty and amiable disposition of the native women, has given rise to a proverb in common use among the Portuguese, English and Dutch, that the Kingdom of Bengale has a hundred gates open for entrance, but not one for departure.”4

  At the time, Bengal was a part of the larger Mughal Empire, whose emperor in distant Delhi ruled weakly through his representative, known as the diwan. The rulers could not always provide physical security: Portuguese pirates raided the coastal villages and carried off tens of thousands of slaves, and marauders from central India routinely descended on horseback to lay waste to the western districts. But because the revenues from Bengal were vital to Mughal power, the diwan attended to the province’s long-term prosperity.

  In the early 1700s, a far-sighted diwan named Murshid Quli Khan reformed the administration. Sixteen powerful zamindars, or overseers, and about a thousand minor ones, ran the province under his watchful eye. The zamindars, who called themselves rajas if they were Hindu and nawabs if they were Muslim, maintained armies, collected taxes, and ran the courts, police, postal services, and often the schools. Villagers owned the lands they tended, and not even bankruptcy could evict them. Tax-exempt fields attached to temples and mosques aided the poor, whereas those who excavated ponds or made other improvements earned tax remissions. Agricultural taxes—a fifth of the harvest—could be paid in kind, without resort to moneylenders. The state, recognizing farmers, spinners, weavers, and merchants as the source of its wealth, tried to protect them. “The money in the hands of the people of the country is my wealth which I have consigned to their purses,” explained Alivardi, a ruler in the mid-eighteenth century, cautioning his grandson Siraj-ud-daula to abstain from extortion. “Let them grow rich and the state will grow rich also.”5

  Soon, however, Bengal would descend into subjugation and ruin. Upon ascending to the Bengal throne, the impetuous Siraj-ud-daula confronted the British East India Company. In 1717 the Company had obtained from the Mughal emperor in Delhi the right to trade salt, opium, tobacco, and betel nut (a mild intoxicant) without paying customs duties, but many of its employees were claiming this right for their personal transactions and thereby defrauding the royal treasury. Moreover, in 1756 war broke out between England and France. The Company, fearing attack by French merchants, began to fortify its riverside trading post, Calcutta, and ignored the new diwan’s order to desist. Siraj-ud-daula pursued a rival into Calcutta and took English prisoners, many of whom died of suffocation in an airless room that would become notorious as the Black Hole of Calcutta. This episode, embellished by Europeans and propagated as proof of native savagery, would retroactively help to justify what came next: the conquest of Bengal and, ultimately, India. General Robert Clive came to the rescue of Calcutta and defeated Siraj-ud-daula at the Battle of Plassey on June 23, 1757.6

  Clive’s victory was aided by his conspiracy with Siraj-ud-daula’s general, Mir Ja
far, who became the new nawab. As arranged, Mir Jafar paid the East India Company £2.2 million and its officers and troops £1.2 million, of which Clive took a lion’s share. Two hundred barges carrying the first installment of the Company’s booty set off from the capital city of Murshidabad on July 3, 1757, accompanied down the Ganga (or Ganges) River by the trumpeting of a British military band. It was a momentous occasion, for countless such tributes would thereafter flow from east to west. That day, another procession in Murshidabad displayed Siraj-ud-daula’s body draped over the back of an elephant.7

  Bengal now had a government beholden to the Company, but its treasury was empty. Mir Jafar’s unpaid soldiers mutinied. The British East India Company’s senior local officers, known as the Calcutta Council, soon replaced him with one of his rich relatives, Mir Qasim, claiming as a reward for his elevation to power another £200,000 for themselves and, for the Company, the revenues of the prosperous districts of Midnapore, Burdwan, and Chittagong. The Council put the task of collecting taxes up for auction, ceding it to whoever promised the greatest returns for each of the contract’s three years. “Thus numberless harpies were let loose to plunder, whom the spoil of a miserable people enabled to complete their first year’s payment,” related Harry Verelst, a later British governor of Bengal.8

  The new ruler, Mir Qasim, was not a weakling. Since the triumph at Plassey, every Englishman had been trading without paying customs duties, which not only pinched the treasury but undercut local businessmen as well. Bengal’s towns began to empty out, bankrupt local merchants moved to other Indian cities, and shopkeepers took to downing their shutters and running when British traders and their soldiers approached. Some winders of silk cut off their thumbs for fear of being forced to work in factories run by Englishmen. Mir Qasim protested, complaining also that these British merchants “force the people to sell their goods at a quarter the price and tyrannize over the common man and the trader.” In the noblest moment of his unhappy reign, he rescinded customs duties for everyone, native and foreign alike. Affronted British merchants now demanded that the duties be restored, for all but themselves. Mir Qasim conceded—provided the East India Company remove all its troops from Bengal’s soil.9

  The result was war. Mir Qasim, soon defeated by the British, fled westward, ultimately dying in obscure poverty, and Mir Jafar returned to the throne, paying his British protectors another £500,000 for the privilege. After his death in 1765, the Calcutta Council installed one of his sons, in return for a payment of £230,000. Also during this year, Clive rendered a final and momentous service to the British East India Company. He gave its emerging empire a legal foundation and a lucrative source of income by obtaining from the ever-weakening Mughal emperor in Delhi the right for the Company to collect the revenues of Bengal province. (This vast administrative unit, larger than France, comprised three segments, Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa—regions that were differentiated by language.) In return, the emperor would annually receive £272,000, which left, in Clive’s estimation, “a clear gain to the Company” of £1,650,900 a year. As a result, the East India Company became de facto ruler of India’s richest province.10

  Within five years, Bengal became India’s poorest province. The stream of treasure flowing to England had led to a boom in the Company’s shares—a boom that was threatened now that Bengal had run out of money and its industries lay in ruins. The directors in London had come to expect enormous profits, even as they owed His Majesty’s Government an annual payment of £400,000; so the Company proceeded to collect agricultural taxes with unprecedented rigor. It parceled out by auction the task of extracting revenue from the entire province. No longer were taxes a portion of the harvest, to be paid in kind: the Company operated on the principle that all land belonged to the state and fixed the tax at a specific monetary level, now called rent. This had to be paid in silver even when a crop failed, and farmers who could not pay lost possession of their land. The Company did make more money; for instance, the annual revenue from Bihar, which previously hovered around £200,000, shot up to £680,000. The tax collectors were so oppressive, wrote cloth merchant William Bolts, that farmers were often “necessitated to sell their children in order to pay their rents, or otherwise obliged to fly the country.”11

  For centuries, gold and silver had poured into Bengal; they now poured out. The East India Company no longer had to transport bullion to India to purchase goods for selling abroad. Instead, the tax revenues from Bengal supplied all the capital it had previously imported for investing in trade, and more. “If a district yielded, as in the case of [Birbhum], £90,000 of revenue, the Council took care that not more than £5000 or £6000 were spent in governing it,” explained a nineteenth-century historian, William Hunter. “From the remainder, ten thousand pounds or so were deducted for general civil expenses, ten thousand more for the maintenance of the army, and the surplus of say £60,000 was invested in silks, muslins, cotton cloths, and other articles, to be sold by the authorities in Leadenhall Street.” The revenue enabled the British East India Company to build on that London thoroughfare an expansive administrative center, called the India House. Often the Company’s officials diverted the tax surplus to finance wars in Madras and to purchase tea in China; silver also flowed out when Englishmen sent their profits home. Between 1766 and 1768, Bengal imported £624,375 worth of goods and cash and exported £6,311,250—the amount going out ten times greater than what came in.12

  Such an economic drain could not go on forever. By 1769, Bengal had no gold, silver, or other valuables left. A group of Armenian merchants—whose trade in the region long preceded that of the British—petitioned the Calcutta Council, complaining that the lack of currency had brought virtually all business to a halt, so that “not only a general bankruptcy is to be feared, but a real famine, in the midst of wealth and plenty.”13

  Then the rains failed. “The fields of rice are become like fields of dried straw,” wrote a superintendent. Recognizing that the cost of rice would go up, British officers and their Indian agents, who enjoyed a monopoly on trading rice, bought up all that they could, often forcing peasants to part with the grain they had kept for planting. The British East India Company dispatched a shipload of grain for its forces in Madras, stocked up 5,000 tons for local troops, and, fearing that revenues would fall short, urged “rigor” in tax collection. By then the famine was in full force.14

  “All through the stifling summer of 1770 the people went on dying,” Hunter recounted. “The husbandmen sold their cattle; they sold their implements of agriculture; they devoured their seed-grain; they sold their sons and daughters, till at length no buyer of children could be found; they ate the leaves of trees and the grass of the field; and in June 1770 the Resident at [Murshidabad] affirmed that the living were feeding on the dead.” A third of the people of Bengal, numbering about 10 million, perished.15

  The British East India Company’s policies had clearly aggravated the disaster. Despite repeated petitions, the Company had refused to march a brigade of troops out of a hard-hit district of Bihar, where they were appropriating all the available grain, to a region farther west that was better provisioned. (Calcutta’s officials feared that if the troops were not close at hand, the French would take the chance to invade from bases in the Indian Ocean.) The Company also prohibited trade in rice among the districts of Bengal—unless the grain was destined for the cities of Murshidabad and Calcutta, the administrative centers of Bengal and the Company, respectively. In particular, the southern and eastern districts were permitted to export rice only to Calcutta. A contemporary observer would note that “as much grain was exported from the lower parts of Bengal as would have fed the number who perished for a whole year.”16

  Most important, during previous droughts agriculturists would have possessed grain, stored in anticipation of a bad year, as well as jewelry, coins, or other savings they could use to purchase rice. (Neighboring areas had a decent harvest. One zamindar bought rice in Benares, west of Bihar, had it
transported down the Ganga in barges, and distributed it to famine sufferers on the riverbanks.) By 1770, however, rural Bengal had no currency left—even as, at the height of the famine, speculators were selling their hoards of rice at six times the usual price. Virtually every employee of the Company reaped huge profits in rice speculation. One Company clerk in Murshidabad, who could ordinarily scrape together no more than £200 a year in savings, allegedly sent £60,000 to England that year.17

  The East India Company did spend £9,000 on famine relief, mainly by buying rice in the districts and distributing it in the cities of Murshidabad and Calcutta—even as it collected from Bengal that fiscal year a substantial rent of £1.4 million. Bihar, where many villages lost four-fifths of their population, yielded the Company a little above £400,000 for 1770, an amount that led the London directors to complain of being “deeply affected to see ourselves disappointed.” Amazingly, at the end of that year a tremendous crop stood in the fields, planted by hands no longer alive to reap it. In February 1771, the Calcutta Council reported to the directors: “Notwithstanding the great severity of the late famine and the great reduction of people thereby, some increase has been made in the settlements [revenue collections] both of the Bengal and the Behar provinces for the present year.” The revenue did not fall, commented a subsequent governor-general, Warren Hastings, “owing to its being violently kept up to its former standard.”18

  Large harvests appeared the next two years as well, and the Company’s annual earnings continued to rise as its agents forced villagers to pay the rent owed by dead neighbors. “While the country every year became a more total waste, the English Government constantly demanded an increased land-tax,” Hunter wrote—adding that the collections inevitably faltered. The villagers of Birbhum “were dragooned into paying the land-tax by Mussulman troops, but notwithstanding the utmost severities the receipts seldom amounted to much more than one-half of the demand.”19