I have read Mukherjee’s book Churchill’s secret war. I have also read this Swami person’s article on Times of India. And I decided to jot down this quick response. I do not have time for a longer one.

First – I do not consider Times of India to be a fair independent news outlet. In fact I am not sure India, or the US or UK or Australia (countries whose news media I can read because of a common language – English), have any independent free press left.

Times of India does not even have the guts to publish what they found through interviewing me, with regard to wholesale slow poisoning of the people through disastrous glyphosate based herbicides approved illegally, and allowed to be used recklessly in agriculture, while the nation refuses to even test its food to find out how much of the poison has entered the food system.

So, to start with, I refuse to take articles on TOI to be worth more than a cheap and bad quality toilet paper.

Next, about this Swami person. He admits not having read the book of Mukherjee and yet agrees to disagree with her point of view and readily refers to Tharoor. I do not know Tharoor to be any serious researcher. His books, a few that I have read, appear to be scratching at the surface and playing for the gallery in superficiality with regard to India, the west and everything else. I do not consider Tharoor to be a suitable person to use as reference on any topic as serious as mass extermination of three million people.

Next, this Swami guy gives lots of examples from past and going forward to Nepoleon, the Tzar and to Chiang Kai Shek and what they did or would have done, to more or less justify what Churchill did, since everyone else did it too.

The thing is – all those characters such as Nepoleon, Tzar and generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek, were in effect emperors or dictators, who ruled over their people by force and not necessarily with the approval of the people.

Churchill, the last time I checked, was an elected public servant, and although he was only elected by the British and not by Indians, the charter, the best I understand, was for him to be a servant at the pleasure of the King or the Queen of England, and not at any time, have the authority to act unilaterally, least of all involving mass murder. Churchill also did not take permission from the British citizens who voted him into power, for permission to kill millions of Bengali people in order to support the war effort in the far east. Lastly, he and his government did its best so the knowledge of the man made famine and preventable mass murder did not reach the media.

So, by equating Churchill with Nepolean and the Tzar, Mr. Swami perhaps displays a lack of depth in his perception of what makes an elected public servant and what makes a dictator. Perhaps someone should educate him on this subtle difference.

Lastly, he could have taken the trouble of studying the Bengal famine, even without reading Mukherjee’s book, merely because it was the single biggest manmade famine of the time if we discount the 1776 famine of Bengal. By manmade famine, I mean famine that was not related to draught and where food was available and yet mass starvation happened. I do not know if Mr. Swami’s apathy is due to lack of interest in reading Mukherjee’s book or because the victims were Bengali and not from southern India, He could still have found out that the millions did not die directly because all the food was siphoned away for the soldiers. Rather, there was a perception that the price of food was going to rise because the British were buying up rice. And because of this perception, merchants started hoarding the food out of sight, and thus food became unavailable except for those that could pay for it, and that this “disappearance” of food happened mostly in rural bengal and not in towns, so the townsfolks and newspaper people did not come to know about it.

Churchills involvement comes from the fact that he stopped humanitarian aid being offered by countries such as Canada and Australia, who wanted to send shiploads of free grain to address the artificial famine. All these could have easily been averted without stopping the supply of food to the war effort, if Churchill wanted. He was informed about it all. He refused to allow help to reach rural Bengal. he refused to put in place mechanisms that would stop the hoarding. He allowed the mass starvation to happen on his watch, as if he secretly willed it to happen. He wanted the Bengali poor to die in huge numbers, without being implicated in it.

Thus, it is implied by Mukherjee and with good reason, along with actual facts such as shipment issues and transcripts of meetings between Churchill and ministers on this issue, that Churchill stands guilty of wilful genocide.

Swami claims that an independent India, under the same circumstance, would have done the same. He is wrong. Amartya Sen has in his earlier groundbreaking studies on the economics of famine, explained how the man made famine in Bengal was acceptable under British rule because the Indian starving masses had no vote, but in a democratic system politicians care more about retaining their chair than even winning a war, and would never allow mass starvation to happen to voters on their watch. Sen is correct as the future years of Independent India shows.

Mr. Swami appears to be poorly educated and ill-informed on this issue, and displays a lack of depth and penetration in his deductive ability. He seems to have remarkable similarity with Tharoor in scratching at surfaces of issues and remaining superficial in his analysis.

But, at the end of the day, India is a free country. Everybody has a right to be stupid.