UNITED KINGDOM, February 15, 2019 (Bloomberg Opinion by Shashi Tharoor): The recent flap over Winston Churchill — with Labour politician John McDonnell calling Britain’s most revered prime minister a “villain” and prompting a rebuke from the latter’s grandson–will astonish many Indians. That’s not because the label itself is a misnomer, but because McDonnell was exercised by the death of one Welsh miner in 1910. In fact, Churchill has the blood of millions on his hands whom the British prefer to forget. “History,” Churchill himself said, “will judge me kindly, because I intend to write it myself.” He did, penning a multi-volume history of World War Two, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his self-serving fictions. As the Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies remarked of the man many Britons credit with winning the war, “His real tyrant is the glittering phrase, so attractive to his mind that awkward facts have to give way.”
What Churchill was above all, though, was a committed imperialist–one determined to preserve the British Empire not just by defeating the Nazis but much else besides. At the start of his career, as a young cavalry officer on the northwest frontier of India, he declared the Pashtuns needed to recognize “the superiority of [the British] race” and that those who resisted would “be killed without quarter.” And his principal victims were the Indians–“a beastly people with a beastly religion,” as he charmingly called us, a “foul race.” Churchill was an appalling racialist, one who could not bring himself to see any people of color as entitled to the same rights as himself. Thanks to Churchill’s personal decisions, more than 3 million Bengalis died of hunger in a 1943 famine. Churchill deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles, meant for yet-to-be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs. “The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious” than that of “sturdy Greeks,” he argued.
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