Churchill's Secret War Read online

  “Hundreds of us insurgents could easily hide in the ravaged countryside,” Dhara would write, “but when I contemplated the suffering that the people faced, I felt utterly overwhelmed.” Satish Samanta organized villagers to repair the banks of the Rupnarayan, somehow procuring muri and chire (flattened rice) to feed everyone while they worked. “We built eight miles of embankments out of mud,” recalled Radhakrishna Bari. After a month or so the government set up relief centers in the towns, but some who collected rice there complained that the police followed them home to smash pots and trample on the cooked food. A government relief worker charged that by day he was expected to provide succor, and by night he had to indicate to the police and the military the villages that had received food, so that the communities could then be punished.21

  In response to these actions, on December 17, 1942, the rebels set up their own government for the region. Drawing inspiration from a happier past, they called it the Tamrolipto Jatiyo Sorkar, or the Tamluk National Government. In the future it would merge with a free government of India, a newsletter announced, but for the time being the president was Satish Samanta.22

  The teenage Bari began to compose the government’s newsletter, called Biplabi (Revolutionary), using news that couriers brought from diverse corners of the district. His elders provided the editorials. Late at night, on the attic floor of a mud house, Bari would print the sheets on an old hand-operated Roneo duplicator. Most copies were distributed in the villages, but local businessmen smuggled some to Calcutta in consignments of betel leaf. The renegade government also set up civil courts that operated with the consent of all parties. More menacingly, it boasted a “national militia” headed by Sushil Dhara—who would also come to run secret tribunals that tried, convicted, and sentenced informers and other allies of the British, usually in absentia.

  Ajoy Mukhopadhyay, the finance minister of the rebel government, instructed Dhara to serve notices on selected landowners, demanding cash in amounts commensurate with the extent to which they were deemed to collaborate with the authorities. Most paid right away, and Mukhopadhyay ordered the “arrest” of those who did not. (Among the leaders of the Tamluk government, he was probably the least committed to Gandhian values.) Dhara also forced landowners to share any excess rice with the villagers.23

  The Tamluk government’s officials got no pay, but they did get food. “We went on strict rations, only a little rice and lentils, and as much vegetable as we liked,” related Bari. “Our leaders gave away most of the rice we could get. They also thought of other kinds of food, encouraged people to grow pumpkins. The silt that the flood had brought was very fertile—I never saw such a crop of pumpkins in my life. Only the runners who brought the mail were allowed all the rice they could eat, for they had to go far. It was very hard work.”

  Sushil Dhara could eat staggering quantities of food—on one occasion he downed 150 pithe, or filled crepes. Having to trek tens of miles each day, he found the ration very painful and debilitating, and would sometimes be discovered by his soldiers leaning on his stick in the middle of a path, fast asleep. If there was a benefit to their deprivation, it was that the rebels became as skinny as everyone else, the easier to blend in.

  “YOU KNOW THAT Calcutta is being bombed,” Clive Branson wrote to his wife in early January 1943. “But do you know that an acute food crisis is raging throughout Bengal?” Branson was on leave in Bombay, where his hotel served ample food: “breakfast, lunch and dinner are all five course meals.” But reading the newspapers made him melancholy. “I fear that we may again be called out to maintain law and order—don’t misunderstand me—not to shoot the speculators, landlords, government officials, but to deal with the angry people” who were rioting for food.24

  The price of rice in Bengal had jumped after the cyclone, and in February 1943 official policy gave it a further, lethal boost. Leonard G. Pinnell headed the Bengal government’s Department of Civil Supplies, which was charged with acquiring rice for Calcutta’s “priority classes”—employees of the government and of firms deemed essential to the war effort. His task, supported by requisition from northern Bengal, had begun well enough. But at Christmas of 1942, Japanese aircraft bombed Calcutta, causing suppliers to down their shutters and laborers to pile their bundles on their heads and stream out. Pinnell had to do something drastic. “It had become a fight for survival, for collapse in Calcutta—not only the headquarters of Government, but with its port, its railways, and its industrial area—would have been a disaster for the Province as a whole, and for the successful prosecution of the war,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir. He forcibly acquired stocks of rice in the city—inadvertently driving all remaining supplies underground.25

  What happened next is best told in the words of another civil servant, Binay Ranjan Sen, who was entrusted with overseeing cyclone relief in Midnapore. (A decade later, Sen would head the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.) Pinnell was supposed to provide Sen’s operation with grain, but cyclone relief was getting only a quarter of its requirements, Sen told the famine commission: “I could not possibly carry on with such meager supplies.” On February 13, 1943, however, he was instructed to no longer rely on Pinnell but instead to buy what rice he could on the market. The Civil Supplies Department could not fulfill even its primary task of feeding the war effort, Sen explained. When that department’s officials found their reserves to be critically short, “they instructed their agents to go to any place and purchase at any price” and store the rice on behalf of the government. The alternative to such desperate acquisitions was to use the police to seize grain from rural areas, which would “probably lead to much violence,” Pinnell confirmed in his memoir.26

  Because there were no limits to what the administration would pay, rice prices immediately escalated. Worse, several other bodies—the Bengal Chamber of Commerce, the railways, the Government of India, and the army—were also told to fend for themselves. (The Bengal Chamber of Commerce comprised mainly British-owned firms, dealing in ordnance manufacture, jute, coal, banking, tea, tobacco, and other industries, all of which were deemed essential for the war effort.) Armed with vast quantities of paper money, these entities began to vie with one another to buy up the winter crop. Sen joined the competition.

  “Every morning one or two of my men came to me to say that Mr. MacInnes”—a former bank employee who was working for Civil Supplies—“had offered say about Rs. 22 and why should I not buy at Rs. 21 per maund,” Sen related. (A maund is equivalent to 37.4 kilograms.) Just a few days earlier, a man from central Bengal had offered Sen rice at 13 or 14 rupees a maund. But the “same afternoon he found that the price went up to Rs. 15 and he could not keep up the contract,” Sen continued. “This shows that the prices in the morning were not the same as the prices in the evening. In that way the prices went up within a few days to nearly double.” Civil servant Olaf Martin confirmed, in his unpublished memoir, that the authorities were asking agents to buy rice and store it for the government in private warehouses, and that “every large Government purchase helped to raise prices still further.” The middlemen were playing the bureaus and firms against one another to extract enormous profits.27

  The absence of boats hampered the trade in grain, but the railway carriages that took troops and their equipment out of the city could bring rice on the return trip. That meant that the sky-high prices in Calcutta vacuumed rice out of rural marketplaces and into storehouses, where it awaited transport to the city. In Bengal, half the crop went to rice mills and thereupon to the rural or urban market; the other half, which village women husked by hand, stayed mainly with landowners. By the spring of 1943 almost all the machine-milled rice seems to have ended up with the government and its agents, as well as some part of the hand-milled rice. A district official would subsequently tell the commission investigating the famine that even the larger landowners had very little rice left early that year: “Whatever stock was available had been bought up at fantastic prices by milita
ry contractors and speculators.” Of the 10.5 million Bengali families that depended on agriculture for their livelihood, four-fifths owned too little land to feed themselves in a normal year, earning what more grain they could by working on plots owned by wealthier families. With the landowners carefully husbanding the remnants of their stock, the landless would starve.28

  Later that February, Sen could find only two men, each with a maund of rice, selling their wares in Geokhali, a market town that normally supplied much of Tamluk subdivision (including Kalikakundu). Quite possibly some rice still remained in Midnapore, a cyclone relief worker would later tell the famine commission, but if so the Ispahani Company controlled most of it. In December 1942, this relief worker had seen close to 20,000 tons of rice stacked at a rice mill near the railway station at Contai. But the mill owners had refused to sell him any because they were under government orders to store it for the agents. Every grain of rice that made it to that mill through normal channels of trade was earmarked for Calcutta, the relief worker would charge. Over the two months during which he had seen the grain stacked at the rice mill, the price of rice in Contai had risen by three times.29

  In a replay of the famine of 1770, rice was being extracted from the countryside to feed the army and the city of Calcutta. If instead the harvest had been distributed evenly, the epidemic of widespread hunger would have been deferred to late 1943—at least in those districts of Bengal that were unaffected by scorched earth or cyclone. But the lifting of price controls and the panicked purchases precipitated famine right away, and everywhere. The authorities had been faced with a stark choice, as Pinnell would confess to the famine commission. It was either “death of a large number of people in the rural area,” he said, or “chaos in the city,” which would have impaired war production and services. “The first choice was taken.”30

  By the end of February, district officials were reporting widespread starvation in the villages of eastern Bengal and urging immediate relief measures. Biplabi listed seven starvation deaths and a hunger-related suicide that occurred in March in Tamluk subdivision. During a tour that he undertook at the time, Sen concluded that “famine was in the offing and its character would be overwhelming.”31

  A DETAILED SURVEY conducted in 1944 by statistician Prasanta C. Mahalanobis and his team would find Bhola, in eastern Bengal, to have been the region worst affected by famine—no doubt because of rice and boat denial, which most severely impacted the east. Among the regions studied, however, Tamluk subdivision ranked second worst, with 13.2 percent of the population having perished in 1943 alone. Since Contai had been much harder hit by cyclone but suffered slightly less from famine, some other factor appears to have increased the mortality in Tamluk. That was probably repression—in particular, the destruction of food reserves in the many hamlets that were suspected to shelter rebels. Although by March 1943 famine had set in, the authorities continued to burn down homes and rice supplies. And increasingly they targeted the most vulnerable supporters of the insurgency: women.32

  Kumudini Dakua’s husband was in prison, having been arrested for protesting rice denial, but on November 1, 1942, she had trekked with a colleague to the remote village in Sutahata where her in-laws lived. The neighbors warned her not to stay for long, but her mother-in-law was so happy to see her, and it was such a rainy day, that she took the risk. At midnight, police and soldiers surrounded the two-story mud house. (Soldiers on internal security duty were assisting the police, as authorized by the district magistrate.) “Sepoys came in, knocked the lamp over, hit my father-in-law,” Dakua recalled. “They aimed rifles at us, but we refused to leave the house at night. There were many reports of rapes.”33

  The police officer restrained his men, told the captives they could leave in the morning, and withdrew. He must have retired somewhere, for after a while two or three sepoys suddenly broke in, ran up the stairs, and grabbed the young women. But because police and soldiers were perpetrating many rapes, Dhara had supplied his female recruits with daggers. They pulled out the weapons and attacked the assailants, who fled, bleeding but not seriously hurt, down the stairs. Early the next morning the police handcuffed the women and walked them to Tamluk. Kumudini was seventeen but small, and a senior police officer scolded his subordinate for having arrested a child. “He said to me, you stay here tonight, tomorrow you can go home,” Dakua recalled. “But I was in prison for fifteen months.”

  The first night, in a cell that stank of urine, she stayed awake listening to an unknown man in another cell singing: “Those whose lives are made of sorrow, what is more sorrow to them?”

  A WEEK AFTER the flood, the police were searching for Anil Kumar Patro, an eighteen-year-old member of Sushil Dhara’s band, and burned down Patropara, the hamlet of Kalikakundu in which his extended family lived. Their stash of rice was also destroyed. “My father was furious with me,” Patro recalled, but Dhara visited and somehow managed to pacify the paterfamilias.

  Soon after, Patro helped the Tamluk militia kidnap a local zamindar and release him for a ransom of 7,000 rupees. The dreaded police officer Nolini Raha hunted furiously for the perpetrators. “He would come with his men and burn down our shelters—he burned some seven or eight of them,” Patro said. But the chowkidar (watchman) who informed Raha of the rebels’ whereabouts also told the insurgents when to run, so the officer could not catch them. In his frustration he decided to teach the villagers who sheltered the fugitives a lesson.

  On January 9, 1943, Dhara heard that the police were raiding the village of Masuria, seven miles north of Kalikakundu, and sent a couple of youths to investigate. Reaching a canal that bordered Masuria, they saw on the other side two sepoys, each dragging a woman by her long hair. The women were Behula Burman and Satyabala Samanta, according to one of the witnesses, Basudeb Ghora. They screamed that several women had been raped, and they feared that they would be, too. “We could do nothing—they had guns. We had to run in case they got us,” Ghora recalled.

  The police used to come often, recalled a Masuria villager, Kanonbala Maity. They would beat the men up and, not being able to find whomever they were looking for, would eventually go away. Her husband, she attested, still bore the scars of a whip on his back. That day, when he heard all the commotion and knew the police were coming, he had hidden in a hole that he had dug just for the purpose. Maity, who was nineteen, had a one-year-old who was playing in front of the house, and she had run out to bring him in. She could not find him—because, it later turned out, her sister-in-law had picked up the child and raced with him to safety. But as Maity hunted frantically for her boy, a sepoy had caught her. She was fortunate that he was the only one to have raped her.

  The police and soldiers scoured the houses, took all the men they could find at gunpoint to the bank of a nearby canal, and beat them. Maity’s father-in-law was also rounded up. “Not a grown man was left around,” she said, and as for the other women, Maity could only hear them: “The whole village was screaming, the terror of it!” For weeks afterward she had hidden in the house, too ashamed to emerge in the daylight. “I never lied to anyone, I never quarreled with anyone,” Maity would say, wondering why she had suffered so.

  According to testimonies subsequently compiled by Bari and others, forty-six women were raped that day in Masuria and its two neighboring villages of Dihi Masuria and Chondipur. Most victims, including a fourteen-year-old, were each raped by two or three uniformed men, and one woman by four. A twenty-one-year-old, Sindhubala Maity, had already been gang-raped by the police and was suffering from internal injuries; she died after the second assault. Hundreds of police or soldiers were estimated to have taken part in the affair, some to round up the men and the others to rape. The scale of the attack suggests the complicity of the district magistrate, Niaz Mohammad Khan (if not a more senior official), who had assigned this sizeable force for an operation against unarmed villagers.34

  THE GANG RAPE in the three villages of Midnapore would have a far-reaching political outco
me. It contributed to the downfall of Chief Minister Fazlul Huq as well as to the induction of a Muslim League ministry in Bengal that would enable Governor Herbert to run the province as he chose.

  In late January 1943, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, a politician with a Hindu nationalist party, received from the Tamluk government’s courier, Krishna Chaitanya Mahapatro, an issue of Biplabi. Mookerjee had served as Bengal’s finance minister but had resigned his post on November 16, 1942, citing official callousness in the response to the cyclone that he said had possibly “no parallel in the annals of civilized administration.” According to Mahapatro, when Mookerjee read about the gang rapes, he wept. He subsequently wrote to Chief Minister Fazlul Huq, informing him of the assaults.35

  A few days later, on February 2, Governor Herbert reported to Viceroy Linlithgow that the situation in Midnapore had improved. “Even from Tamluk hope to be able to release troops first week of March if improvement maintained,” he declared. In another few weeks, however, Herbert wrote to complain that Mookerjee had made a “most venomous statement” in the Bengal legislature. Worse, Huq had responded by promising “an impartial enquiry by persons of the status of High Court Judges into the alleged excesses by officials in Midnapore!” It was all very annoying, given that the governor had recently flown to that district to reward policemen who were rendering “loyal service” in the combat against Congress rebels. Herbert opposed any special investigation into the events in Tamluk and demanded of the chief minister that he explain his “failing to consult me” before promising it.36