Churchill's Secret War (25 page)

On April 29, 1943, he got caught. Acting on a tip, plainclothes policemen and officers from Calcutta surrounded a village home that Dhara was visiting. He ran out the back door, flipped over two men who came at him, jumped a ditch, landed his foot on a patch of cow-dung, and fell flat on his face. Several men piled on him. The sepoys did not recognize Dhara, for unknown to them he had grown a beard as part of his disguise, but the officer to whom they took him was better informed. Satish Samanta had already been arrested, which left Ajoy Mukhopadhyay as the only significant leader not in custody. Mukhopadhyay needed his right-hand man and hatched a plot to free Dhara before he could be dispatched to a distant prison.

The captive had been taken to Tamluk jail, where he had a warm reunion with other rebels, including his elder brother. One night Dhara came down with violent stomach cramps. Two friends sat by with worried faces—while his brother, who was not in on the plot, became frantic with anxiety. The prison doctor had been paid off. He ordered that Dhara ingest nothing but milk and barley, which ensured that the patient became progressively more haggard. He also took away a stool sample and, in a few days, announced that the prisoner had a potentially lethal internal hemorrhage. The jail superintendent came to check on the patient, by which time Dhara looked suitably awful.

A Congress worker now applied at Tamluk court for Dhara’s bail, and as expected it was refused. That meant bail could next be sought at a higher court in Midnapore town, where Mukhopadhyay had bribed the public prosecutor. The judge perused the medical report, said that he could not let a man die in prison, and with the prosecutor not uttering a squeak of protest granted “town bail”—release into Tamluk. A go-between raced back to Tamluk prison and presented the order before the police got wind of what was going on. Dhara hobbled out, leaning heavily on the friend, clambered into a rickshaw, and vanished into the night.
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The police put a reward of 10,000 rupees on his head. Dhara had shaved right after getting out of prison but the mug shots had him heavily bearded, so that false sightings were reported from everywhere.
Still, with the police perpetually on the lookout, it was hard for him to get around. So Radhakrishna Bari was dispatched to Calcutta with the task of obtaining proof of Dhara’s death. He got hold of an emaciated volunteer who suffered from gastric ulcer, admitted him to a hospital under the name Sushil Dhara, and withdrew him after the doctor had supplied a fearsome medical report. Subsequently an unclaimed corpse—there being many on the city’s streets by that time—was cremated, with Dhara’s name being entered in the “burning register,” which the police subsequently checked. Word went out that Dhara had died.

Soon after Dhara’s escape, Ajoy Mukhopadhyay got caught. The loss of the Tamluk government’s two top leaders almost broke its back. Partly out of desperation, Dhara increased his reprisals on informers, so that in a few months the authorities could no longer find anyone to spy for them.

At this time, two of Dhara’s female subordinates asked him if they could participate fully in the movement—if, that is, they could also kill. Both women had spent time in jail for their political activities but had hitherto been used only as decoys. To test their mettle, Dhara had them first observe slayings, then dissect bodies and throw the pieces into a river at high tide, so that all traces of the crime would disappear. “I saw no distress even when they were covered in blood,” he reported in his autobiography. Next the women were assigned to commit executions, which they performed flawlessly: “Either of them could walk thirty or thirty-five miles by night, accomplish her task and be found asleep in the morning in her bed—such a thing happened many a time.” All this the women did for love of liberty, Dhara attested.

In such manner the Tamluk region became a
muktanchal
, or free zone, where members of the renegade government could carry out their duties without always having to look over their shoulders.
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“I CONFESS TO being somewhat disturbed about the continuance of Congress troubles in Western Bengal and can only hope that Nazimuddin’s Government will tackle the Congress miscreants in the Midnapore District with greater vigor than its predecessor,” Amery wrote
to Linlithgow on May 25, 1943. The Bengal administration had more pressing problems, however. In March, Governor Herbert had requested permission to use special wartime ordinances to dismiss Bengal’s cabinet, which he felt would enable him to deal directly with the food problem. Linlithgow replied that these coercive laws were for containing political subversion, not for solving problems of food supply, which might “disappear entirely”—after the war was over.
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Linlithgow did lift provincial barriers so that Bengal could purchase rice in Bihar and Orissa. This time the food minister, Huseyn Suhrawardy, appointed the Ispahani Company the principal buyer of grain, giving it an advance of 30 million rupees and instructions to buy at any price. (An exhausted Leonard George Pinnell had departed for a district posting.) Prices in Bihar and Orissa immediately rose, and starvation deaths were reported there, so the administrators of those provinces defied the Government of India’s orders, arrested the purchasing agents, and held up grain shipments to Bengal. They suspected fraud—and, indeed, a subcontractor of the Ispahanis was later proved to have cheated the government out of millions of rupees.
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On May 27, 1943, Linlithgow advised Amery that he was “unable to guarantee” the stability of the Indian economy. Every necessity of life—food, fuel, drugs, cloth—was “approaching the scarcity limit.” The manifold causes included the lack of shipping for imports and the diversion of every industry to war production, which had left a dearth of products for civilian use. As a result, all the cash in the economy was being used to buy up grain, the only commodity at hand. Thus far, the viceroy continued, the Government of India had “succeeded in holding the fort: in producing the men and material needed for the war and in keeping the vast majority of the population quiescent.” But the “real resources of the country are already strained almost to breaking point: on the psychological side, we are within sight of a collective refusal to accept further paper currency.” The time had come when the United Kingdom needed to choose between “utilising India as a base for operations and utilising India as a source of supply for overseas theatres and countries.”
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“Bengal is rapidly approaching starvation,” the governor of Bengal wrote to the viceroy on July 2. Unless he received immediate help, Herbert could not “guarantee two indispensable requirements of the war effort, internal security and war production.” (At no recorded instance did either the governor or the viceroy express concern for their subjects: their every request for grain would be phrased in terms of the war effort. Contemporaries attested that Herbert did care about the starvation in Bengal; so prioritizing the war effort may reflect his and Linlithgow’s estimation of which concerns might possibly have moved their superiors.) Hunger was widespread in the districts, Herbert wrote three weeks later, and masses of ticketless beggars were boarding trains in the hope of finding food in the towns. The U.S. Board of Economic Warfare reported in July: “Famine has been a real and ever present threat, and it is now reliably estimated that unless substantial quantities of food-stuffs are forthcoming from outside sources, hundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation will occur in India during the current year.”
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Also that July, a committee headed by economist Sir Theodor Gregory reviewed the food problem in India and urged a ban on grain exports, in particular those of rice, in order “to stop the crop of rumours which have exercised a dangerous effect on the country.” Rather, the committee called for imports: a half-million tons to create a grain reserve and thus stabilize the market, and another million tons a year to meet the country’s continuing needs. Such imports were all the more urgent, the committee stated, because eastern India, which was suffering the most from shortages, would also be the base for future military operations.
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The Government of India warned Amery that the food shortfall was so large that “it will be physically impossible to bridge the gaps entirely with India’s own resources.” On July 23, possibly because the Gregory Committee report had been leaked to the press, the Government of India announced a cessation in rice exports. At about the same time, it asked the India Office for 80,000 tons of wheat to be imported every month for six months, for a total of almost a half-million tons. Half of that quantity would support the army for six months, while the remainder would go toward feeding laborers and otherwise shoring up industrial
production. The mere knowledge of impending imports would have a decisive effect on prices, the viceroy wrote, because it would squeeze out hidden hoards. Indeed, he wanted to be able to make a public announcement that His Majesty’s Government had guaranteed “shipping sufficient to import into India enough wheat to satisfy all reasonable requirements of the population.”
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LORD LINLITHGOW’S TERM as viceroy was to be over on October 30, 1943, and in June the prime minister had decided upon Field Marshall Wavell as his replacement. Churchill had never thought much of Wavell—he had once remarked that the general would make a decent manager of a golf club—and had hit upon this way of easing him out of the military command chain. Meanwhile, General Claude Auchinlek had also incurred the prime minister’s displeasure and had reverted to his former position as commander-in-chief in India.
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In London on July 30, the War Cabinet’s shipping committee considered Viceroy Linlithgow’s request for grain. An India Office representative stated that “famine conditions” were appearing in Bengal and in parts of the south, and relayed Auchinlek’s opinion that India might not be usable as a base until the food problem was solved. The committee was divided in its response. Some members argued that meeting the colony’s need “could hardly do more than involve some degree of interference with the re-establishment of stocks in the United Kingdom” unless some large military need showed up in 1943. The minister of war transport objected, however, that providing the ships to lift any more than 30,000 tons of grain a month from Australia would involve “a serious dislocation of our plans.” In the end, the shipping committee noted a “wide divergence of opinion as to the part which the import of cereals should or could play in solving the Indian economic problem” and left the decision to the War Cabinet.
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It was the Prof who questioned the role that “the import of cereals should or could play,” as evident from a memo he prepared for the prime minister the day before the War Cabinet took up the problem. Despite India’s urgent demands during the previous winter, he wrote, “the emergency
vanished.” (The India Office was now reporting the outbreak of famine, but Cherwell perceived no link between current events and the earlier crisis.) On top of that, the Indian harvest was massive. “Yet we are told that failure to provide half a million tons of cereals will result in a reduction of national output, refusal to export food [to Ceylon], famine conditions, civil disturbance and subversive activity among the troops in the Indian army.” Imports were being regarded as a means of extracting stocks from hoarders, Cherwell complained. “This seems a roundabout way of tackling the problem. In any event, it is a little hard that the U.K., which has already suffered a greater drop in the standard of life than India, should be mulcted because the Government of India cannot arrange its affairs in an orderly manner.”
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One draft of this memo ended with the sentiment that, since shipping would be needed to feed Italian civilians if the Allied invasion caused Italy’s fascist government to collapse, expending it on famine relief in India “scarcely seems justified unless the Ministry of War Transport cannot find any other use for it.” The sentence was eventually changed to a straightforward recommendation against sending grain.
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According to minutes of the War Cabinet meeting of August 4, 1943, the secretary of state for India began the proceedings. (The transcripts released in 2006 are more candid than the minutes, but they unaccountably stop in mid-July, just before this crucial meeting.) The Indian economy “was being strained almost to breaking-point” by the demands of war, Amery stated, and the direst effects could be countered only by meeting the viceroy’s request. The War Cabinet took the view, however, that the problem “could not be dealt with simply by the importation of grain.” Lord Leathers argued that it would be “extremely difficult” to find ships to get grain to India. If the War Cabinet felt that something needed to be done, he would suggest sending “not more than 50,000 tons as a token shipment. This should, however, not be earmarked for India but should be ordered to Colombo to await instructions there.” It might also be possible to send up to 100,000 tons of barley from Iraq.
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Lord Leathers owed his position and peerage to the prime minister, and took his cues from him. In his diaries, Field Marshal Alan Brooke
accused Leathers of “trimming his sails to the wind”—adjusting the availability of ships to suit the War Cabinet’s predilection. Lord Moran, Churchill’s doctor, likewise described Leathers as a weak man who did whatever Churchill told him to. The prime minister, in contrast, was all praise for Leathers’s efficiency. “It was very rarely that he was unable to accomplish the hard tasks I set,” he would write. On several occasions, when no one could solve a pressing problem such as finding the ships to transport an extra division, “I made a personal appeal to him, and the difficulties seemed to disappear as if by magic.” In any debate over sending grain to India, Leathers would invariably state that the shipping could not be found, in the right quantity or at the right place, and no personal appeal on behalf of Indians was forthcoming from the prime minister.
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