Many of us have a kind of apocalyptic view of famine, and there is no doubt that, once the stigmata of starvation are revealed, the images haunt you lifelong, says Dr Binayak Sen in his speech at the fifth annual K C John memorial lecture at Kovalam Literary Festival in Trivandrum.
Before we embark on our examination of the coming famine in India, we would do well to look at some recent history -- specifically, at the Bengal famine of 1943. Three million people died in that famine. I heard stories about that famine from my mother, as did many middle class Bengalis of my age. There was no shortage of grain. This is one point I would like to emphasize, because everybody equates famine with a shortage of food, particularly a shortage of grain. There was no shortage of grain in Bengal in 1943, just as there is no shortage of grain in India today -- indeed, there is so much excess grain that the government is hard put to store it so it does not rot.
Amartya Sen has famously analyzed the economics of that famine as "the failure of exchange entitlements"; in other words, those social arrangements, that enabled the people to access the food that they needed, broke down.
Recently a young historian, Madhushri Mukherji, has further extended this analysis. She has shown, on the basis of documentary evidence, in a book called 'Churchill's Secret War' that a racist Winston Churchill made a special direct intervention to ensure that the rice from Bengal was sequestered to feed the British war effort, and then he similarly sequestered the Australian wheat that was supposed to take its place. Finally, in order to forestall a Japanese crossing of the Bay of Bengal from Myanmar -- now in Japanese control -- to Medinipur, he declared a scorched earth policy in Medinipur, destroyed all the grain, and, in order to prevent any riverine transport of grain, burnt all the boats and sank them in the river.
All this in 1943, on the orders of Mr. Churchill. The needs of the army were deliberately privileged over the lives of three million of the Bengal peasantry. The point I am trying to make here is that famines, and, by extension, the other major human rights abuses that go on and on happening in our country and around the world, do not just happen on their own account. They are perpetrated as the result of policies that privilege the rich and powerful, and, by implication, harm the poor and disenfranchised.
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