Churchill's Secret War (19 page)

“Every morning one or two of my men came to me to say that Mr. MacInnes”—a former bank employee who was working for Civil Supplies—“had offered say about Rs. 22 and why should I not buy at Rs. 21 per maund,” Sen related. (A maund is equivalent to 37.4 kilograms.) Just a few days earlier, a man from central Bengal had offered Sen rice at 13 or 14 rupees a maund. But the “same afternoon he found that the price went up to Rs. 15 and he could not keep up the contract,” Sen continued. “This shows that the prices in the morning were not the same as the prices in the evening. In that way the prices went up within a few days to nearly double.” Civil servant Olaf Martin confirmed, in his unpublished memoir, that the authorities were asking agents to buy rice and store it for the government in private warehouses, and that “every large Government purchase helped to raise prices still further.” The middlemen were playing the bureaus and firms against one another to extract enormous profits.
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The absence of boats hampered the trade in grain, but the railway carriages that took troops and their equipment out of the city could bring rice on the return trip. That meant that the sky-high prices in Calcutta vacuumed rice out of rural marketplaces and into storehouses, where it awaited transport to the city. In Bengal, half the crop went to rice mills and thereupon to the rural or urban market; the other half, which village women husked by hand, stayed mainly with landowners. By the spring of 1943 almost all the machine-milled rice seems to have ended up with the government and its agents, as well as some part of the hand-milled rice. A district official would subsequently tell the commission investigating the famine that even the larger landowners had very little rice left early that year: “Whatever stock was available had been bought up at fantastic prices by military contractors and speculators.” Of the 10.5 million Bengali families that depended on agriculture for their livelihood, four-fifths owned too little land to feed themselves in a normal year, earning what more grain they could by working on plots owned by wealthier families. With the landowners carefully husbanding the remnants of their stock, the landless would starve.
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Later that February, Sen could find only two men, each with a maund of rice, selling their wares in Geokhali, a market town that normally supplied much of Tamluk subdivision (including Kalikakundu). Quite possibly some rice still remained in Midnapore, a cyclone relief worker would later tell the famine commission, but if so the Ispahani Company controlled most of it. In December 1942, this relief worker had seen close to 20,000 tons of rice stacked at a rice mill near the railway station at Contai. But the mill owners had refused to sell him any because they were under government orders to store it for the agents. Every grain of rice that made it to that mill through normal channels of trade was earmarked for Calcutta, the relief worker would charge. Over the two months during which he had seen the grain stacked at the rice mill, the price of rice in Contai had risen by three times.
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In a replay of the famine of 1770, rice was being extracted from the countryside to feed the army and the city of Calcutta. If instead the harvest had been distributed evenly, the epidemic of widespread hunger
would have been deferred to late 1943—at least in those districts of Bengal that were unaffected by scorched earth or cyclone. But the lifting of price controls and the panicked purchases precipitated famine right away, and everywhere. The authorities had been faced with a stark choice, as Pinnell would confess to the famine commission. It was either “death of a large number of people in the rural area,” he said, or “chaos in the city,” which would have impaired war production and services. “The first choice was taken.”
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By the end of February, district officials were reporting widespread starvation in the villages of eastern Bengal and urging immediate relief measures.
Biplabi
listed seven starvation deaths and a hunger-related suicide that occurred in March in Tamluk subdivision. During a tour that he undertook at the time, Sen concluded that “famine was in the offing and its character would be overwhelming.”
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A DETAILED SURVEY conducted in 1944 by statistician Prasanta C. Mahalanobis and his team would find Bhola, in eastern Bengal, to have been the region worst affected by famine—no doubt because of rice and boat denial, which most severely impacted the east. Among the regions studied, however, Tamluk subdivision ranked second worst, with 13.2 percent of the population having perished in 1943 alone. Since Contai had been much harder hit by cyclone but suffered slightly less from famine, some other factor appears to have increased the mortality in Tamluk. That was probably repression—in particular, the destruction of food reserves in the many hamlets that were suspected to shelter rebels. Although by March 1943 famine had set in, the authorities continued to burn down homes and rice supplies. And increasingly they targeted the most vulnerable supporters of the insurgency: women.
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Kumudini Dakua’s husband was in prison, having been arrested for protesting rice denial, but on November 1, 1942, she had trekked with a colleague to the remote village in Sutahata where her in-laws lived. The neighbors warned her not to stay for long, but her mother-in-law was so happy to see her, and it was such a rainy day, that she took the risk. At midnight, police and soldiers surrounded the two-story mud
house. (Soldiers on internal security duty were assisting the police, as authorized by the district magistrate.) “Sepoys came in, knocked the lamp over, hit my father-in-law,” Dakua recalled. “They aimed rifles at us, but we refused to leave the house at night. There were many reports of rapes.”
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The police officer restrained his men, told the captives they could leave in the morning, and withdrew. He must have retired somewhere, for after a while two or three sepoys suddenly broke in, ran up the stairs, and grabbed the young women. But because police and soldiers were perpetrating many rapes, Dhara had supplied his female recruits with daggers. They pulled out the weapons and attacked the assailants, who fled, bleeding but not seriously hurt, down the stairs. Early the next morning the police handcuffed the women and walked them to Tamluk. Kumudini was seventeen but small, and a senior police officer scolded his subordinate for having arrested a child. “He said to me, you stay here tonight, tomorrow you can go home,” Dakua recalled. “But I was in prison for fifteen months.”

The first night, in a cell that stank of urine, she stayed awake listening to an unknown man in another cell singing: “Those whose lives are made of sorrow, what is more sorrow to them?”

 

A WEEK AFTER the flood, the police were searching for Anil Kumar Patro, an eighteen-year-old member of Sushil Dhara’s band, and burned down Patropara, the hamlet of Kalikakundu in which his extended family lived. Their stash of rice was also destroyed. “My father was furious with me,” Patro recalled, but Dhara visited and somehow managed to pacify the paterfamilias.

Soon after, Patro helped the Tamluk militia kidnap a local zamindar and release him for a ransom of 7,000 rupees. The dreaded police officer Nolini Raha hunted furiously for the perpetrators. “He would come with his men and burn down our shelters—he burned some seven or eight of them,” Patro said. But the chowkidar (watchman) who informed Raha of the rebels’ whereabouts also told the insurgents when to run,
so the officer could not catch them. In his frustration he decided to teach the villagers who sheltered the fugitives a lesson.

On January 9, 1943, Dhara heard that the police were raiding the village of Masuria, seven miles north of Kalikakundu, and sent a couple of youths to investigate. Reaching a canal that bordered Masuria, they saw on the other side two sepoys, each dragging a woman by her long hair. The women were Behula Burman and Satyabala Samanta, according to one of the witnesses, Basudeb Ghora. They screamed that several women had been raped, and they feared that they would be, too. “We could do nothing—they had guns. We had to run in case they got us,” Ghora recalled.

The police used to come often, recalled a Masuria villager, Kanonbala Maity. They would beat the men up and, not being able to find whomever they were looking for, would eventually go away. Her husband, she attested, still bore the scars of a whip on his back. That day, when he heard all the commotion and knew the police were coming, he had hidden in a hole that he had dug just for the purpose. Maity, who was nineteen, had a one-year-old who was playing in front of the house, and she had run out to bring him in. She could not find him—because, it later turned out, her sister-in-law had picked up the child and raced with him to safety. But as Maity hunted frantically for her boy, a sepoy had caught her. She was fortunate that he was the only one to have raped her.

The police and soldiers scoured the houses, took all the men they could find at gunpoint to the bank of a nearby canal, and beat them. Maity’s father-in-law was also rounded up. “Not a grown man was left around,” she said, and as for the other women, Maity could only hear them: “The whole village was screaming, the terror of it!” For weeks afterward she had hidden in the house, too ashamed to emerge in the daylight. “I never lied to anyone, I never quarreled with anyone,” Maity would say, wondering why she had suffered so.

According to testimonies subsequently compiled by Bari and others, forty-six women were raped that day in Masuria and its two neighboring
villages of Dihi Masuria and Chondipur. Most victims, including a fourteen-year-old, were each raped by two or three uniformed men, and one woman by four. A twenty-one-year-old, Sindhubala Maity, had already been gang-raped by the police and was suffering from internal injuries; she died after the second assault. Hundreds of police or soldiers were estimated to have taken part in the affair, some to round up the men and the others to rape. The scale of the attack suggests the complicity of the district magistrate, Niaz Mohammad Khan (if not a more senior official), who had assigned this sizeable force for an operation against unarmed villagers.
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THE GANG RAPE in the three villages of Midnapore would have a far-reaching political outcome. It contributed to the downfall of Chief Minister Fazlul Huq as well as to the induction of a Muslim League ministry in Bengal that would enable Governor Herbert to run the province as he chose.

In late January 1943, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, a politician with a Hindu nationalist party, received from the Tamluk government’s courier, Krishna Chaitanya Mahapatro, an issue of
Biplabi
. Mookerjee had served as Bengal’s finance minister but had resigned his post on November 16, 1942, citing official callousness in the response to the cyclone that he said had possibly “no parallel in the annals of civilized administration.” According to Mahapatro, when Mookerjee read about the gang rapes, he wept. He subsequently wrote to Chief Minister Fazlul Huq, informing him of the assaults.
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A few days later, on February 2, Governor Herbert reported to Viceroy Linlithgow that the situation in Midnapore had improved. “Even from Tamluk hope to be able to release troops first week of March if improvement maintained,” he declared. In another few weeks, however, Herbert wrote to complain that Mookerjee had made a “most venomous statement” in the Bengal legislature. Worse, Huq had responded by promising “an impartial enquiry by persons of the status of High Court Judges into the alleged excesses by officials in Midnapore!” It was all very annoying, given that the governor had recently flown to that
district to reward policemen who were rendering “loyal service” in the combat against Congress rebels. Herbert opposed any special investigation into the events in Tamluk and demanded of the chief minister that he explain his “failing to consult me” before promising it.
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Fazlul Huq and John Herbert had already clashed over alleged gang rapes and murders by soldiers posted in Noakhali, along the coast of eastern Bengal. And the upcoming famine was yet another source of friction. Huq was a peasant leader. He could not fail to observe that rice denial had removed the remnants of 1942’s stock from villages, that the cyclone and subsequent pests had damaged the vital year-end crop, that no imports were in sight, that rice exports continued unabated, and that the government’s purchases had precipitated an ominous price rise. Huq had repeatedly warned that pervasive hunger was about to worsen into outright famine, which meant that instead of dying quietly in their huts, millions of skeletal, wild-eyed people would drag themselves out of their villages in a conspicuous search for food. But Herbert believed that Huq’s alarms had prompted cultivators to hang on to their stocks—an explanation for why the government could not procure enough rice for the war effort.
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The governor resolved to remove the chief minister. On March 28, 1943, the night before the budget for Bengal was to be discussed—a critical matter given the anarchic economy—Herbert summoned Huq to the governor’s palace. He presented the visitor with a typewritten resignation letter and browbeat him into signing it. “Huq, and Huq’s Ministry, were a menace to good government and security,” the governor subsequently explained to the viceroy. A ministry minus the “Caste Hindus” who constituted a number of Huq’s associates would in Herbert’s view be “infinitely better than the Ministry which has gone if it is to be remembered (as it hardly ever is in Bengal politics) that the war has to be won and the Congress rebellion kept under.”
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For Herbert, retaining firm control over Bengal’s policies meant working with the Muslim League, which was eager to supplant Huq’s coalition. In Bengal, Muslims formed 55 percent of the population, with almost all the remainder Hindu. The 1935 Indian constitution
had, however, given 119 seats in the legislature of Bengal to Muslims, and only 80 to Hindus. The seats confiscated from Hindus had gone to Europeans, who, although comprising only 0.04 percent of Bengal’s population, held 10 percent of the seats. Fazlul Huq, a moderate Muslim, had scraped together the numbers for a ministry with the help of Hindu politicians left over after those belonging to the Congress had gone to prison. With Huq out of the way, the so-called European Group of legislators (mainly representing British business interests) could help loyalist Muslims form a government. In three weeks Bengal was being governed by a Muslim League ministry headed by Sir Khwaja Nazimuddin, advertised as “undoubtedly a friend of the British.” While bemoaning the governor’s unorthodox methods in having forced Huq’s resignation, the viceroy trusted that Nazimuddin would “lend much more effective support to [the] war effort than we were ever able to get from Huq.”
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