Better, not worse, drought response

Several scarlet-tipped chapters in world history can chronicle British cruelty and indifference more vividly than Winston Churchill’s heartless response to the cable from the government in Delhi to London about the Bengal famine — one of the biggest tragedies seen before India’s independence in 1947. Yet even as people were starving to death, thousands of tonnes of rice were eventually shipped to war zones where the British and its allied armies were stationed. Some 400,000 people were kept alive for a whole year with 70,000 tonnes of rice between January and July 1943 but Churchill’s remark that Indian lives didn’t matter as they didn’t vote left an indelible scar on the psyche of the leaders of the Indian freedom movement. So let this be a cautionary tale for the local politicians who showed similar contempt for the people of Thar who are currently in the throes of devastating drought conditions and the consequent spread of hunger and disease. Like the pre-partition famine 75 years ago, the drought in Thar can be traced to exploitative economic policies of the government. The only stark difference was that the British were foreign colonialists who became the masters of the Indian sub-continent. But what could have been the excuse of the Sindh administration that had been at the helm of affairs for a good decade and was as familiar with the problem of drought as could be possible? Therefore as Qaumi Awami Tehreek chief Ayaz Latif Palijo has suggested, both the sin of apathy to the plight of Tharis and the feeble, inappropriate response is unpardonable. Neither Bengal nor Tharparkar have escaped the stigma of famine before and the authorities then and now should at least have been more considerate towards them. Apart from the widespread loss of life in Tharparkar, the famine led to abject mass poverty.

More lives were lost in the Bengal famine than the cataclysmic events of partition in 1947. This is important to remember due to vast scale of deaths involved and also in the hope that the administration could be awoken to the gravity of the threat at hand. Let us confront the truth that we need to revise our poor agrarian policies and avoid manufactured genocides in future. 

Published in The Express Tribune, October 12^th, 2018.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.