Famine in India

” . . . If this country does not get 4,000,000 tons of grain quickly, anything between 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 people are going to die. They will not get that much help, so they will, in fact, starve.” You remember the Bengal famine. This will be worse. Not so spectacular, perhaps, but worse. In this queer land where the few are fantastically rich and the many are unbelievably, grindingiy poor, the poor are going to be thinned out this year by something like the population of London. . . . .” (Daily Express, 23/4/46.)

One of Lord Beaverbrook’s team of high-pressure journalists, James Cameron, writing from Madras, makes this prophecy of what is going to happen in India this year, and there seems to be no reason to doubt his words.

Large numbers of Indians have, of course, died every year through starvation or semi-starvation, but
the figure this year promises to be so staggering that even the Daily Express cannot tuck the news away in some odd corner, or ignore it entirely. The Daily Express not only records the facts, but on the same page as Cameron’s article tells us the cause. It says :—-

“The world famine has little to do with the war. Real cause, drought; drought last year in Australia, the Argentine, Canada and the United States; drought which brought total supplies in those four wheat-producing countries down to 68,500,000 tons this year from 90,000,000 tons in 1942-43 . . .”

But Mother Nature seems to have been in a selective mood in withholding her bounties in India, for Mr. Cameron notes that it is the “unbelievably, grindingiy poor” who are going to starve.

The Daily Express’s ready-made explanation may comfort the complacent, but it fails to deceive those who know that wide-spread famine is one of the perpetually recurring horrors of the present system of society. Millions are going to starve in India this year for the same reason that millions have starved there and in other parts of the world for many years past in peace and war whether the crops have failed or not. They starved during the boom years as well as during the great industrial depression between the wars, when crops were being destroyed in an effort to maintain prices. Millions will starve in the future as long as “the few are fantastically rich and the many are unbelievably, grindingiy poor.” A million and a half died of starvation in Bengal in 1943, and the report issued by the Famine Inquiry Commission (reported in Forward, 19/5/45) said: —

“After considering all the circumstances, we cannot avoid the conclusion that it lay in the power of the Government of Bengal, by bold, resolute and well-conceived measures at the right time, to have largely prevented the tragedy of the famine as it actually took place. . . . Enormous profits were made out of the calamity and, in the circumstances, profits for some meant death for others. A large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved, and there was much indifference in the face of suffering. . . .”

But starvation is not just an Eastern problem. Sir J. B. Orr’s investigations (“Food, Health and Income,” 1936) showed that no fewer than four and a half million persons in this country existed on a food expenditure of 4s. per week, and there was no suggestion that these went hungry for any other reason than that they were poor. This is the one thing common to all these tales of hunger. The hungry ones are always the poor.

Mr. Cameron savs: —

” …. It has been said that the great expanse of India’s soil, if properly worked, could feed the world. Instead, the world is called on to feed India. The answer, of course, is water. These are not the richly irrigated lands of the Punjab. Here it all must come from the sky, and it has not …. But there again it is not wholly the fault of the drought. Arable land in the South of India has been worked and worked for centuries, till it is worked out . . .” (Daily Express, 23/4/46.)

Why were the fields not irrigated and why has the land been worked out? It must be because there was no profit in vast irrigation schemes and a properly balanced agriculture. It cannot be beyond the powers of industry and science, which produced Mulberry harbours and imprisoned atomic energy, to carry the water of India to the places where it is needed, or restore the fertility of an exhausted soil.

Who cares about the starving Indian poor? Certainly not those, coloured and white, who have built colossal fortunes by the impoverishment of the Indian masses, whose main diet at the best, according to Cameron, consists of “a strange, malleable, doughy lump, in almost every way resembling putty . . . ,” made from seeds seen in England only in a parrot’s tray. He says that these people are unable to digest any other form of food, but we shall examine this extraordinary statement a little more closely if it can be shown that the “fantastically rich” also possess peculiar digestions like these.

We shall not forget this latent crime of capitalism. We know that even if Messrs. Jinnah, Nehru, Ghandi, Cripps and the rest can decide who is to have the privilege of presiding over the miseries of the Indian poor, they will not then proceed to remove the yoke from their necks. Can we, the wage workers in Britain, do anything to help capitalism’s victims in India? Yes, by building up the revolutionary movement of socialism, nationally and internationally, until it is strong enough to take over the powers of government to establish a system of society based on the common ownership of the means, of production and distribution. There is no other road that the world’s
workers can take to free themselves from hunger and misery.

GEE

(Socialist Standard, June 1946)