250 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
U.S. Board of Economic Warfare estimated that hundreds of thousands
of people would die if external supplies of food were not ur gently
shipped to India. Churchill, however, felt no sympathy for the Indians,
whom he regarded as a beastly people; he turned down requests for
ships to be made available to carry food to the starving millions.^28
Subhas Chandra Bose tried to send rice from Burma to Bengal, but
the British in India nervously suppressed his offer. On August 20, 1943,
Rangoon Radio broadcast his proposal to send one hundred thousand
tons of rice to Bengal from a port near India. Bose promised that as
soon as the British expressed their willingness to accept the delivery, he
would name the harbor that would load the shipment and the authori-
ties who would hand over the rice. He would ask the Japanese for a
guarantee of safe conduct for the supply ships. Once the first delivery
had been made, further deliveries could be arranged. He expressed his
earnest hope that his offer would be accepted, since “hundreds of thou-
sands of men, women and children would be saved from starvation.”
His words reached the desperate people in his homeland. “The latest
Bose rumor,” a British intelligence report stated days later, “is to the ef-
fect that he has written to the Viceroy asking him to send two ships to
enable Bose to send rice to the starving people of Bengal.” There was a
flurry of activity in the corridors of power in New Delhi to impose the
strictest press censorship on Bose’s offer. “We are of course particularly
anxious to discredit Subhas Bose in ev ery possible way,” Richard Tot-
tenham noted on September 1, 1943.^29
Burma was more than just a potential source of rice. It was a store-
house of rich symbolic resources for India’s struggle against the British
Empire. The last Mughal emperor had been exiled to Burma in 1858,
after his show trial at the Red Fort of Delhi. On September 26, 1943, a
ceremonial parade and prayers were held at Bahadur Shah’s tomb in
Rangoon, to signal the INA’s determination to march to the Red Fort of
Delhi. Bose paid his respects:
We Indians, regardless of religious faiths, cherish the memory of Ba-
hadur Shah, not because he was the man who gave the clarion call to
his countrymen to fight the enemy from without, but because he was
the man under whose flag fought Indians from all provinces, Indians