In 1943, as the Southeast Asian theatre of World War II reached a crescendo, the Imperial Japanese Army occupied Burma, a crucial supplier of rice to British India. In response, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill's government, despite food shortages in Bengal, redirected grains, ships, and resources from India to support the Allied war effort. The war cabinet also implemented a scorched-earth policy and burned rice paddies and other critical resources to counter the Japanese advance. All of this led to a devastating famine that claimed the lives of an estimated 2 to 3 million Bengalis, many of whom perished not from a lack of food, but because they could not access it. While millions starved in Bengal, Britain increased its stockpile to nearly five million tonnes of grain — far exceeding their needs.

A Man-made Horror Of Unimaginable Scale

The Bengal famine of 1943 was one of the greatest human tragedies of the twentieth century, engineered and exacerbated by imperial policy and apathy at the highest levels of British leadership. Churchill blamed the Bengalis for their own suffering and treated them as collateral damage under imperial war logic. Even as the skeletal remains of Bengalis piled up on the streets of colonial Calcutta, Churchill continued to deny requests for food aid, grains, and resources. In fact, his wartime cabinet banned British and Indian newspapers from using the words famine or starvation in their reports, fearing that revealing the scale of the crisis would damage Allied morale and could be used against them by the enemy.

The true scale of the famine became evident to the world only after Ian Stephens, the conscientious editor of The Statesman, published graphic photos of dead and dying Bengali children on the streets of Calcutta. However, the consequences of the famine extended far beyond the immediate suffering, starvation, and deaths it caused.

How Famine Affects Future Generations

Recent research has linked the 1943 famine exposure to a heightened risk of diabetes and other metabolic disorders in subsequent generations of Bengalis. This connection is rooted in epigenetics and developmental health, which examine how early-life experiences, such as malnutrition and starvation, can lead to permanent changes in the body's physiology.

Babies exposed to famine in the womb adapt by developing 'thrifty' metabolisms that help them survive undernutrition. However, when food becomes more available, this metabolic programming increases their risk of type 2 diabetes, obesity, and heart disease. These effects result from fetal programming and epigenetic changes, which may also be inherited by future generations. Research shows that Bengalis born during or shortly after the famine have significantly higher rates of diabetes, highlighting the famine as both a historical tragedy a lasting public health crisis.

Gaza 2025: A Postcolonial Parallel

Today, a similar tragedy is unfolding in Gaza as a result of Israeli occupation and settler-colonial ambitions. Since October 2023, Israel's blockade and military operations have deprived almost 2.3 million Palestinians — over half of them children — of essential supplies like food, water, and medicine, turning the enclave into an open-air prison.

Humanitarian organisations now describe Gaza as the ‘hungriest place on Earth’, with nearly half its population facing severe hunger and starvation. UN assessments reveal famine-like conditions, with at least 20% of households suffering from starvation or severe food deprivation, and widespread malnutrition. Oxfam, Médecins Sans Frontières and other aid groups call the siege a strategy of mass starvation as collective punishment. Even Amnesty International's legal analysis concludes that Israel's deliberate withholding of food and obstruction of aid in Gaza constitute a war crime, possibly even genocide by starvation.

Famine As An Instrument Of Collective Punishment

Much like Bengal, Gaza is being subjected to a political famine — one that could have been prevented, and one that is sustained by state decisions. In 1943, British officials blamed hoarders, inflation, even the Japanese threat, but refused to distribute available food. Today, the narrative is playing out once again as Israel's defenders blame Hamas, but not the structural policies that have blockaded Gaza for 17 years and now decimated its ability to grow, import, or produce food. In Gaza, just as in colonial Bengal, food has become a weapon of mass death.

This is how empire operates. It dehumanises its victims and denies its culpability. It portrays the starving as victims of their own dysfunction and shifts blame from military control to moral failure. The connection between Bengal and Gaza lies not only in the unimaginable scale of human suffering but also in the political intention behind it.

Famine is not a result of nature's wrath but a man-made phenomenon. Famines do not simply occur; they are allowed to happen — engineered, enforced, and justified. Until the world recognises famine as a form of violence and demands accountability from those who wield hunger as a weapon, this cycle will persist. Each new famine will be remembered not just for the lives lost but also for future generations — and those who stood by and let it happen.

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