A tale of two famines

In a new BBC radio documentary series ‘Three Million’ on the Bengal Famine of 1943, the narrator laments the lack of any memorial or monument for those three million Indian people – British Empire subjects at the time – who died due to acute hunger.

Calling it a man-made phenomenon, the documentary describes how the Empire mercilessly stopped the movement of rice – the staple food of the province – by confiscating farmers’ crops and burning their boats as a ‘strategy’ to prevent it from becoming a source of food supply for Japanese forces in the wake of their imminent attack during World War II.

That ‘strategy’, however, resulted in the death of approximately three million Indians while reducing others begging for rice before their resplendent rulers in the streets of Calcutta. According to the documentary narrator, while the former fell in oblivion, the latter lot turned into a living archive no one bothered to talk about for almost 80 years.

However, sometimes the present can also serve as an archive of past misdeeds. In March, ‘Time’ carried a Palestinian women and children rights activist Abeer Barakat’s essay ‘The Horror of Ramadan in Gaza’. “In some sense, we have been fasting since October”, she wrote. In the first week of April, Israel’s missile attack ‘mistakenly’ killed the World Central Kitchen’s seven workers who were en route to their makeshift jetty installed to supply food to thousands of people facing the prospect of famine in Gaza. “History”, says Mark Twain, “does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes”.

If it is not sufficient to connect the dots of what happened in Bengal in 1943 and the present situation of Gaza where, according to the UN, 85 per cent of the population is facing an imminent potential famine risk as 80 per cent of its supplies comes from Israel, one can stretch back his or her imagination a hundred years down the lane to better understand how history rhymes. Mixing rice with potato can also be a good trick to recall history.

The year was 1843, and opulent Britishers were busy grabbing lands from the people of Ireland – the first colony of the Empire. The motive of land grabbing was to use it for cattle grazing and to produce beef for the domestic English market as the fertile soil and topography of Ireland was ideal for the purpose.

This forced the native Irish population to turn to potatoes – only to fall victim to a potential famine two years later due to the spread of a potato disease. The late blight disease destroyed about a third of Irish potato crops, resulting in the deaths of two million Irish people and the migration of an equal number to other parts of the world. Quite unsurprisingly, during the entire period of famine, the export of cows, ships, pigs and grain from Ireland continued unabated in the similar fashion rice was hoarded and exported to England from Calcutta a century later, leaving both native populations starving to death.

If facts fail to connect the dots, callousness does it quite well. Charlis Trevelyan, former Indian administrator and assistant secretary to the Treasury, called Ireland’s famine ‘God’s judgement’ and starvation ‘an effective mechanism for reducing surplus population’ besides arguing that the free market would solve virtually any problem including the famine under the ‘laissez faire’ idea.

In Bengal, British officials called the war, local authorities, the private sector and famine victims and their unwillingness to eat anything but rice as the possible causes of the famine. EM Jenkins, secretary to the viceroy of India, explained the inevitability of famine by calling it ‘a consequence of establishing democratic institutions in a country not fully ready for them.’

Moreover, Isaac Butt, a professor of Political Economy at Dublin University wrote in 1847 that it is a shame that such a huge number of people died of hunger almost within a day’s communication from the capital of the greatest empire of the world.

A hundred years later, the ‘richest’ empire’s secretary of state for India Leopold Amery boasted the ‘efficient network of railways as a steadier source of food and for transport supply from regions of abundance to those of scarcity’ while millions were dying of hunger at an equally steadier pace.

Fast forward to 2024. No empire in sight, and nearly half the number of the total number of people dead in the past two famines are at risk of a potential famine in northern G@z@. According to the Integrated Food Security and Nutrition Phase Classification, almost over two million of the population in the besieged territory in the MENA region has been facing hunger since December, with a majority of people skipping meals every day.

Recent studies on hunger reveal that multiple bouts of hunger can lead to malnutrition, stunting growth in children, and increased vulnerability to diseases which doesn’t resolve with the availability of food afterwards.

Though the intensity and effects of food scarcity in the occupied territory may be low as compared to the Bengal and Ireland famines, efforts taken today can help avert a full-scale famine.

The writer, a Pakistani civil servant, is pursuing a Master’s degree in Public Policy at Monash University,

Melbourne, Australia. He tweets/posts: @gobindmeghwar