Three Famines by Thomas Keneally Page B

blood. She remembered, ‘After that, we children used to go out and throw date seeds covered in dried mud at British soldiers when we saw them in the street.’
    Some British and Indian army officers and men responded brutally to Quit India advocates, especially to Indian women taking part in demonstrations. One activist claims that a woman demonstrator in Delhi was raped ‘not by one officer but by officer after officer, including the British officers’. The authorities in some regions had advocates of Quit India publicly whipped. If missionaries, especially American missionaries, supported Quit India, they faced expulsion from the country.
    American attitudes may well have bolstered what in this case would prove to be the fatal stubbornness of Churchillover Bengal. Another result, however, would be that as the Bengali famine began in 1943, the council of the Congress Party were in prison, and could not react to the disaster as they might have, had they been free. So the famine ran the risk of being overshadowed not only by a great crisis for the British at the war front on the borders of Bengal, but by Indian politics. Because of their arrests, the Indian leadership was not available to protest at, or visit the sites of, the famine. The Bengal famine, rich in destruction as it was, never held a position in Indian history that the Irish famine did in Irish history, or the Ethiopian famines have come to occupy for the Ethiopians.
     
    Linlithgow himself, subject to the advice of his experts, permitted provincial governments to retain all the food they produced within their boundaries and refuse to export it to other parts of India. The ruling of November 1941 by Linlithgow’s executive council, over which he sat as chairman and chief executive, meant that no food came from other provinces into Bengal, even though troops were consuming a great amount of that province’s food. In December, Linlithgow and his council introduced maximum prices of wheat, but this simply made grain dealers retain their wheat in their warehouses, waiting for a better price. In May 1942, a Foodgrains Control Order fixed prices at a level that ensured, without meaning to, further hoarding and ultimate profiteering.
    Neither was Linlithgow solely responsible for otherdecisions and events, such as the British government and army’s 1942 Rice Denial Scheme – their buying-up of Bengali rice to ensure that any advancing Japanese would not be able to use it. In its policy of rice denial, the government forcibly purchased 40,000 tons of grain and trucked it away to feed the army. Though not as much rice was acquired as the authorities hoped, or people in Bengal feared, the psychological impact was far larger than the amount taken away. Its effect on the Bengali imagination was the equivalent of the Irish sense of grain being transported by road and canal for shipping out of the country to England. Since people believed the government and army would take more still, it led to the sometimes panicked, sometimes deliberate, hoarding of rice for future sale, and thus to a huge ramping-up of the price of rice for the labourers and craftsmen who tried to buy it at their village shops.
    It is likely that such policies as these derived from London instead of New Delhi, from the war cabinet itself. And the governor of Bengal, Sir Jack Herbert, agreed to the denial policies without briefing the Bengali provincial cabinet. He assured the Bengal provincial legislature that the government did not intend to burn houses or remove household grain. The Bengal chief minister wrote to Herbert, ‘In a matter of such vital importance, affecting the question of the foodstuffs of the people, you should have called an emergency meeting of the Cabinet … but you did nothing of the kind.’ Herbert had not done so because he knew the removal of surplus grain would, in itself, drive up prices of food in the mofussil – the countryside. He did not want to face any political