In other words, People’s War was not simply a CPI magazine. It was essentially a British-sponsored anti-nationalist propaganda magazine run by the Marxists in India on behalf of British India Home Secretary. That artist Chittaprosad was working for this magazine makes him a British propagandist by proxy rather than an independent-minded artist.

Their Politics

So with their “changed line”, “the Communists not only decided to extend their unstinted support to the government in its efforts to solve the food crisis but also took a soft line towards the lapses of the government and its bureaucracy on this issue.” (D N Gupta, 2008) In a typically Stalinist fashion, the CPI blamed repeatedly the “hoarders”, “black-marketers” and recommended that the “surplus stocks in rural areas was to be diverted to urban areas because that was the only method to prevent the havoc.”

A decade ago, during the Ukraine famine, Marxist dictator Joseph Stalin had used the same lines and tactics. The chilling parallels between what Stalin did during the Ukraine famine and the recommendations of CPI, should make a theme for in-depth study:

“Famine stuck the Soviet Union in 1932 for the second time in ten years. A result of the brutal methods of forced collectivization, the famine affected Ukraine (where the government suspected peasants were holding back hidden stocks of hoarded grain) more than other areas ... Armed units went from village to village, and house to house, to violently seize the grain stores including seed for the coming planting season. When requisitions did not bring in enough food to satisfy Moscow, new waves of armed forces were sent back to take still more grain.” (James W Heinzen, 2004)

Indian Communists also tried to organise in Bengal what Stalin had done in Ukraine with their own limited resources and power. “People's Food Committees” were formed to “force hoarders through moral and local pressures to disclose their stocks”. (D N Gupta, 2008) Had Churchill desired to do to Indians what Stalin did to Ukrainians, he could not have got better collaborators than the disciples of the father of ‘scientific’ Famines – Stalin!

It was not just the extra-territorial allegiance of Indian Marxists which made them adopt a soft approach to the British government’s criminal engineering of the genocidal Bengal Famine. Historian D N Gupta writes in his Communism and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1939-45 (Sage, 2008) that the soft line was also “due to the fact that any aggressiveness on the part of the Party and its cadre would have invited the governments' wrath”.

Naturally, Mookerjee, who was simultaneously rendering mammoth service in famine relief while increasing anti-British nationalist sentiment, became the centre of the attack in their propaganda.

Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee and the Bengal Famine

The British-engineered Bengal Famine was forewarned with a natural disaster on 16 October 1942, which was the Midnapore cyclone and the subsequent ravaging by the tidal waves, which not only killed hundreds of people but also affected 23.5 lakh people. Mookerjee, who went to Midnapore on 30 October, lashed out at the British officials for their revengeful failure to provide basic humanitarian relief measures. The result was that he was arrested by the enraged British officials at Kolaghat. However, the Mookerjee-Fazlul Haq coalition government in Bengal bypassed local British interventions and started providing relief materials.

The Mookerjee-Fazlul Haq coalition government in Bengal was one of the best provincial governments that worked in the best interests of the Indian nation and provided a stellar model for Hindu-Muslim unity towards common national welfare. Academician-administrator Nitish K Sengupta in his book Land of Two Rivers: A History of Bengal from the Mahabharata to Mujib (Penguin 2011) says: