Churchill's Secret War Read online

  Fazlul Huq and John Herbert had already clashed over alleged gang rapes and murders by soldiers posted in Noakhali, along the coast of eastern Bengal. And the upcoming famine was yet another source of friction. Huq was a peasant leader. He could not fail to observe that rice denial had removed the remnants of 1942’s stock from villages, that the cyclone and subsequent pests had damaged the vital year-end crop, that no imports were in sight, that rice exports continued unabated, and that the government’s purchases had precipitated an ominous price rise. Huq had repeatedly warned that pervasive hunger was about to worsen into outright famine, which meant that instead of dying quietly in their huts, millions of skeletal, wild-eyed people would drag themselves out of their villages in a conspicuous search for food. But Herbert believed that Huq’s alarms had prompted cultivators to hang on to their stocks—an explanation for why the government could not procure enough rice for the war effort.37

  The governor resolved to remove the chief minister. On March 28, 1943, the night before the budget for Bengal was to be discussed—a critical matter given the anarchic economy—Herbert summoned Huq to the governor’s palace. He presented the visitor with a typewritten resignation letter and browbeat him into signing it. “Huq, and Huq’s Ministry, were a menace to good government and security,” the governor subsequently explained to the viceroy. A ministry minus the “Caste Hindus” who constituted a number of Huq’s associates would in Herbert’s view be “infinitely better than the Ministry which has gone if it is to be remembered (as it hardly ever is in Bengal politics) that the war has to be won and the Congress rebellion kept under.”38

  For Herbert, retaining firm control over Bengal’s policies meant working with the Muslim League, which was eager to supplant Huq’s coalition. In Bengal, Muslims formed 55 percent of the population, with almost all the remainder Hindu. The 1935 Indian constitution had, however, given 119 seats in the legislature of Bengal to Muslims, and only 80 to Hindus. The seats confiscated from Hindus had gone to Europeans, who, although comprising only 0.04 percent of Bengal’s population, held 10 percent of the seats. Fazlul Huq, a moderate Muslim, had scraped together the numbers for a ministry with the help of Hindu politicians left over after those belonging to the Congress had gone to prison. With Huq out of the way, the so-called European Group of legislators (mainly representing British business interests) could help loyalist Muslims form a government. In three weeks Bengal was being governed by a Muslim League ministry headed by Sir Khwaja Nazimuddin, advertised as “undoubtedly a friend of the British.” While bemoaning the governor’s unorthodox methods in having forced Huq’s resignation, the viceroy trusted that Nazimuddin would “lend much more effective support to [the] war effort than we were ever able to get from Huq.”39

  The rare British administrator who empathized with the natives was also eased out of power. The most senior civil servant in Bengal, Chief Secretary James Richard Blair, asked for early retirement, reportedly because he could not stomach the repression in Midnapore. Blair had related some of his concerns about Bengal’s governance to Amery. Still, when the viceroy decided in another few months that the governor himself was incompetent and needed to go, the secretary of state for India demurred: “Herbert had handled a difficult Ministry well on the whole and given good support to the Military authorities.”40

  Each link in the command chain—Churchill-Amery-Linlithgow-Herbert—was welded to the others by a grim resolve: “the war has to be won and the Congress rebellion kept under,” as Herbert had put it. The care and feeding of the populace was not a priority. “The authorities worried only about how to keep the soldiers and war workers safe, didn’t think about keeping the people safe,” related social worker Ashoka Gupta. “Fish, eggs, fruit, everything was being collected and fed to the army. Big rice banks were formed. They told everyone, give us your rice, we’ll give it back to you when you need it, but they didn’t give any, even after people started dying.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Death of a Thousand Cuts

  “I am glad to learn from the Minister of War Transport that a strict line is being taken in dealing with requests for cereals from the Indian Ocean area. A concession to one country at once encourages demands from all the others,” the prime minister commented in a memo on March 10, 1943. “They must learn to look after themselves as we have done. The grave situation of the U.K. import programme imperils the whole war effort and we cannot afford to send ships merely as a gesture of good will.”1

  For three months, Viceroy Linlithgow had been warning about a food crisis in India, and earlier that March a member of his council, Sir Ramaswami Mudaliar, had told the War Cabinet’s shipping committee of “some danger of famine conditions, particularly in Calcutta and Bombay.” Wheat was available in Australia, but all Indian ships capable of the round trip were engaged in the war effort. Moreover, in January the prime minister had brought most of the merchant ships operating in the Indian Ocean over to the Atlantic, in order to bolster the United Kingdom’s stocks of food and raw materials. He was reluctant to release vessels to carry grain to the colony, because lowered stocks at home would compromise the British economy and limit the War Cabinet’s ability to pursue military operations of its choice—and because his hostility toward Indians was escalating.2

  THE CHANCELLOR OF the Exchequer, Sir Kingsley Wood, had long been warning that India had erased its traditional debt to the United Kingdom and was instead becoming a major creditor. The sterling debt owed to the colony was mounting at a million pounds a day. It would fall due right after the war, just when a ravaged if liberated Europe would have to be fed. Food in the postwar era would be scarce worldwide and expensive to import—and His Majesty’s Government would already be bankrupt from paying for the war. In consequence, maintaining British food stocks had become crucially important to the War Cabinet, and the debt to India a source of profound frustration.3

  On September 16, 1942, Amery had recorded in his diary: “Winston burbled away endlessly, the general theme being that it was monstrous to expect that we should not only defend India and then have to clear out but be left to pay hundreds of millions for the privilege.” The secretary of state for India strove to explain that the debt had little to do with the defense of the colony, but arose from its contributions in manpower and materials to the war in the Middle East and North Africa. “It is an awful thing dealing with a man like Winston who is at the same moment dictatorial, eloquent and muddleheaded,” Amery wrote eight days later. “I am not sure that I ever got into his mind that India pays for the whole of her defence including the British forces in India, or that there is no possible way of reducing these accumulating balances except by stopping to buy Indian goods or employing Indian soldiers outside India.”4

  The prime minister announced at a War Cabinet meeting that the sterling debt should be neutralized by a counterclaim: a bill presented to India for its defense by the United Kingdom. At the very least, he insisted, the financial agreement forged in April 1940 should be revised to make the colony pay more of the costs of the war. Viceroy Linlithgow had already warned against this course of action: “if any suggestion were made that it was doubtful whether India would in due course receive value for her sterling balances, the reaction on India’s war effort could not fail to be disastrous.” Should the United Kingdom signal its desire to renege on its financial commitments, then industrialists, contractors, and even peasants would anticipate a drop in the value of the rupee and balk at supplying goods for cash.5

  The sterling debt arose from the fact that commodities were being continually drawn from India with no recompense beyond the promise of payment in the future. The indiscriminate printing of paper money was enabling the Government of India to acquire supplies for the war effort, both within the country and without. But the situation was volatile: inflation was poised to combine with a shortage of every necessity of life to bring disaster to the colony’s poor. Amery did not anticipate that the Government of India’s warning of August 1942—tha
t inflationary financing might lead to “famines and riots”—would actually come to pass. He was, however, cognizant of the risk posed by such a method of war financing to the war effort itself. Should Indians come to believe that His Majesty’s Government would not keep its promises, the torrent of supplies from the colony would dry up.6

  “Winston cannot see beyond such phrases as ‘Are we to incur hundreds of millions of debt for defending India in order to be kicked out by the Indians afterwards,’” Amery confided to his diary. “But that we are getting out of India far more than was ever thought possible and that India herself is paying far more than was ever contemplated when the present settlement was made, and that we have no means of making her pay more than she wants or supplying goods unpaid for, is the kind of point that just doesn’t enter into his head.” The prime minister was aware that the sterling debt was inverting the economic relationship between colony and colonizer. After the war, money would flow from Britain to India, not as investment to be repaid with interest but as remittance. Whatever the romance of empire, a colony that drains the Exchequer is scarcely worth having—and that reality, notes historian Dietmar Rothermund, would make it easier for India to be finally released.7

  ANOTHER SOURCE OF irritation to Churchill was the 1940 U.S. Republican presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie. In an October 1942 broadcast, he reported to Americans what he had learned on a world tour. “When the aspirations of India for freedom were put aside to some future unguaranteed date, it was not Great Britain that suffered in public esteem in the Far East,” Willkie said. “It was the United States.” The inhabitants of Asia “cannot tell from our vague and vacillating talk whether we really do stand for freedom, or what we mean by freedom.” Willkie’s criticism induced President Roosevelt to reiterate that the Atlantic Charter applied to the entire world and to appoint a seasoned diplomat, William Phillips, as his “Personal Representative with the rank of Ambassador” to India.8

  Apparently stung by the disapproval emanating from the United States, Churchill made on November 11, 1942, what would become his most quoted pronouncement on India. “We mean to hold our own,” he declared in Parliament. “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” According to Amery, the next day he “went off the deep end in a state of frantic passion on the whole subject of the humiliation of being kicked out of India by the beastliest people in the world next to the Germans.”9

  IT WAS AT this inopportune juncture that the viceroy had begun to press the secretary of state for India to arrange for imports of wheat. He further cautioned: “I think it probable that until our own position becomes clearer we shall have to stop all exports of foodgrains.” After the fall of Rangoon in March 1942, the Government of India had undertaken to supply Ceylon and Arabia with the rice that they used to import from Burma. But in a series of telegrams starting that December, Linlithgow warned Amery that cyclone and subsequent pest infestations in Bengal, and a failure of monsoon rains in Madras, had caused a “serious deterioration in food situation in India.” The rice crop was hardest hit, and what with ongoing exports, it would fall short by “something over two million tons.” Wheat and other cereals would possibly be in excess, but the war effort in India and abroad would absorb much of that surplus, leaving a worrisome overall shortage of a million tons of cereals. The stringency anticipated for later in the year was causing many people to stock up on grain, making matters much worse than might be gauged from the numbers alone.10

  The Government of India would subsequently calculate a gap between rice production and consumption of 2 million tons in Bengal alone, with a 3.5 million ton shortage in India overall (including export and defense requirements) for the fiscal year that ended on March 31, 1943. That implies a shortfall of the same order for 1943 as a whole. The actual extent of the rice shortage in Bengal remains controversial to this day.11

  “I am very uneasy about position that is rapidly developing,” the viceroy cabled to Amery on December 13, 1942. Requests for grain were pouring in from the provinces, and the governor of Bombay had threatened to disperse the entire city in the countryside if he did not get 50,000 tons of wheat within a month. The effects of shortages, the viceroy (erroneously) believed, would be confined to urban and industrial areas. “But those, as you know, are precisely the most inflammable areas in some ways from the political point of view,” he continued. A new crop of wheat would be harvested in May, but until then the situation would be acute and he urgently needed 600,000 tons of wheat to arrive by the end of April 1943.12

  The Government of India had been caught unawares by the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia. Any threat to India had been presumed to emanate from the borders of the Soviet Union, the British Empire’s traditional rival in the region—which was why vital ammunitions factories had been placed as far east as feasible, around Calcutta. Worse, the authorities had failed to anticipate that rice imports might be cut off by Japanese conquest and had not planned for any stringency in its supply. Instead they had encouraged jute cultivation in Bengal, reducing the fields available to rice by 2.7 million acres.13

  Although aware of the significance of wheat, which grew in the cooler climes of the northwest and was essential for feeding the army, the government had failed to control the supply of that grain as well. In December 1941, for instance, the authorities had imposed ceilings on the price of wheat. Even in meticulously managed Britain, however, the food ministry could keep down bread prices only by maintaining adequate stocks of wheat and releasing it to the market as required. The Government of India did not have the stocks to enforce price controls. Sellers had refused to accept the new prices, so that little wheat could thereafter be found on the open market. Subsequently, the authorities had decided that India was too large to administer in its entirety and, instead, had empowered each province to protect its own people. That had frozen the grain trade among the provinces. “It is only human nature that if you give a province power to prevent grain going out of its border, that province will look to its own safety,” Robert Hutchings of the Department of Food would explain to the famine commission. The government next undertook to purchase grain from “surplus” provinces such as Punjab in the northwest and to send it to “short” provinces such as Bengal, but failed to procure enough.14

  The problem was that cultivators of the northwest were enjoying a double windfall: their soldier sons were remitting paychecks, and their wheat was more in demand than ever before. Instead of selling, farmers were holding out for higher prices. Indeed, many preferred to keep their savings in the form of grain because they had come to distrust the value and security of cash. An intelligence report noted a widespread fear that after the war the United Kingdom would revise the exchange rate between the rupee and the sterling, thereby slashing the wartime earnings of Indians—as had happened after World War I.15

  Nor could officials use coercion to extract wheat from the northwestern province of Punjab, as they had forcibly claimed the produce of Bengali villagers: maintaining army morale meant pleading with, rather than threatening, the families of Punjabi soldiers. As Linlithgow would subsequently explain to Amery, he did not want to antagonize the helpful ministry that held power there, or to upset cultivators whose sons were in the army. One had to consider, he wrote, “the reaction on the very large numbers of the Punjab soldiers of every religion and community who are serving overseas of the receipt of letters from the Province representing that their houses were being invaded, and their families insulted, under the pretext of requisitioning, and that their legitimate claims out of food profits were being taken from them.”16

  On January 2, 1943, Governor Herbert warned the viceroy that his province was desperately short of wheat. “Bengal’s normal demand is 18,000 tons a month and we are short of nearly twice this amount over last quarter alone. Amount of 110 tons mentioned by you therefore represents only few hours supply.” If factory workers who ate wheat did not get it, they
would either riot or leave, so the shortage threatened the production of ammunition. Herbert urged Linlithgow to get hold of a ship “for large-scale import of wheat which might prove palliative for the whole situation” involving both wheat and rice.17

  AMERY HAD ALREADY responded, on December 15, 1942, that ships were in such short supply that the United Kingdom’s own imports were “cut to bone and involve serious inroads into stocks both of food and of materials.” The War Cabinet wanted assurance that, if it acceded to the viceroy’s request, India would continue monthly exports of 30,000 tons of rice to Ceylon. It also desired confirmation that all ships registered in India were “under full control so as to afford maximum utilisation for war effort.” For the time being, Linlithgow responded, he could spare 12,000 tons a month for Ceylon, and some more for Arabia. Of India’s larger ships, seventeen had been requisitioned and the remaining nine, although still in private hands, were plying military stores and the most essential civil supplies along the Indian coast or to the Red Sea. But Commander-in-Chief Wavell was so concerned about food shortages that he would forgo up to 180,000 tons of war materials if the shipping space could instead be used to bring wheat.18

  So in early January 1943, Amery wrote to Lord Frederick Leathers, the minister of war transport, arguing the urgent necessity of sending to India 600,000 tons of wheat within the first quarter of the year (over and above 30,000 tons already promised to the army). The imports would enable the viceroy “firstly to maintain supplies to the Army, secondly to feed the urban population on whose labour the war effort mainly depends, thirdly to maintain supplies to those areas where for one reason or another there is an unsatisfied deficiency of food grains, and fourthly to convince holders of supplies that holding for a major shortage is not good business.”19