Moreover, the British government had set priorities according to the
needs of the war effort. According to these, armed forces and urban
regions, especially the urban workforce which kept the factories and the
ports running, were to get preference in terms of food and essential
supplies. Transport bottlenecks also ensured that stockpiles of grain rotted
in the humidity of the Bengal climate even as people starved and hoarders
made huge profits. Meanwhile, partly due to the government’s ‘priorities’
policy which kept Calcutta supplied and fed, and partly due to wartime
censorship, news of the famine reached Calcutta only through hordes
of starving villagers appearing on its streets, begging not for rice, but for
the froth from the surface of others’ rice-pots, then dying on the streets
and creating a major health hazard. (Eventually, a Calcutta newspaper,
The Statesman, defied the government and broke the news to the world;
earlier sources of information had been sketches and paintings by artists
from the Communist Party who produced some of the most striking and
harrowing images of the famine.) Relief, such as it was, was mostly
through private initiatives. These, often based on care of the ‘community’,
caused a certain amount of sectarian tension as it was seen that Muslims
were excluded from Hindu relief efforts and vice versa.
The new viceroy, Lord Wavell, who replaced Linlithgow during the
course of the famine, was genuinely shocked by what he saw, but his
requests for relief were resolutely blocked by Winston Churchill, who
argued that ships could not be diverted from their essential wartime duties
to bring grain to the stricken Bengal population. In the end the central
argument that secured relief was a military one. Commander-in-Chief
Lord Auchinleck wrote a memorandum explaining the devastating effects
of the famine on military morale: troops were seen to be sharing their own
rations with the starving Bengal population, and had uneasy consciences
as they realised that the priority to keep them fed was directly causing
starvation among the people they were living amidst. Relief, though was
the proverbial too little and too late; estimates put the number of deaths
at 3.5 million to 4.5 million persons, and disease took its toll on the
weakened population long after direct starvation had ceased.BACK IN THE OUTSIDE WORLD
On June 14, 1945, Nehru and other members of the Congress Working
Committee were released from jail. The British wanted to do business120 THE END OF THE RAJ