India's freedom from the British was accelerated for a few reasons -England had almost emptied its treasury on account of WWII and received too much clobbering from Germany. The war at various fronts took a heavy toll on the British economy. The poor handling of the 1943 Great Bengal famine in which more than a million people died angered the Indians who were highly critical of PM Churchill's biased handling of the crisis. British economy being in a shambles, the crown administration had begun to lose its grip on India.
There was widespread agitation and serious protests sparked in the US and across Europe in june, 2020 in the aftermath of the death of 46-year-old George Floyd, an American black who was killed in downtown Minneapolis publically in day light by the city police men, on 25 May, 2020 while on beat.
In London, a small group of protestors stood around the statue of Winston chanting Churchill was a racist in an apparent attempt to deface the pedestal. Banners with the words “British Colonialism is to blame”, along with “What if it was your son?” had also been left at the base of the statue, while a Black Lives Matter sign was strapped to Churchill’s body.
Statue of Winston Churchill, London.timesofisrael.com |
Above image: June 7, 2020- Protesters defaced the statue of Churchill in central London (Parliament Square), taping a Black Lives Matter sign around its midsection, and crossing out his last name and spray painting “was a racist” underneath. In the city of Bristol protestors vented their anger at the country’s colonial history by toppling the statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston. It was pulled down and thrown into the nearby harbor river........ ......
This is not the first time the statue of Winston Churchill in London was targeted for the first time. His memorials had been targeted by protestors in the past, including on the anniversary of D-Day and in January 2019, when a sculpture of the former Prime Minister in New Bond Street was splashed with white paint.
Ego-centric Churchill,and David Low, U.K. original-political-cartoon.com |
Commenting on the incident on social media, Prime Minister Boris Johnson wrote: “These demonstrations have been subverted by thuggery'- and they are a betrayal of the cause they purport to serve.
Though the matter was labelled as a sheer vandalism, many people questioned: Why was Churchill branded a racist?." Many young English students and youths whose history books contain only the so called concocted facts , but do not contain dark phases in British india history both under the EIC and the crown administration. Obviously, many of them have no idea what kind of role Winston, the hot headed conservative politician had played during the WWII and when India was reeling under the famine in 1943.
Churchill statue being boarded up. twitter.com/Cartoon |
Above image: Paul Thomas on Winston Churchill's statue being boarded up. Black Lives Matter,UK...............
The moot question about Winston's racist attitude could be answered without any hesitation or reluctance. The world does not know the darker side of Winston Churchill who was voted the greatest Briton of all time in the recent past. His statues across England in standing posture are depicted as a great wartime leader with bulldog tenacity of purpose. Little do native Britons or others know that these statues weigh heavy not because of the material it is made of, rather by his own countless crimes that lie embedded in the statues. There is a saying that that the British never close their mouth without hurting others. In the case of Winston, being a racist and believer of British racial supremacy his carping racial slurs had affected many across the globe - Afghans, Africans, Irish, American Indians and most importantly Indians from the subcontinent. His remarks on Indians and their leader Gandhi were like painful dart laced with poison extracted from poison frogs of south America.
As the PM of England when the WWII was on, his views on race and ethnicity came under severe criticism. The former UK's conservative politician was squarely blamed for causing the Bengal Famine of 1943, which resulted in the death of some three million people in West Bengal (India) and Bangladesh. Churchill did nothing to alleviate the suffering of the people in Bengal who died like flies. Churchill’s biased policies are said to have been largely responsible for one of the worst famines in India’s history, The access to international imports contain the famine was being largely denied by his War Cabinet. Reason: purported wartime shortage of shipping. According to historian Arthur Herman Churchill diverted the food supplies from Australia to India to Europe - Allied military campaigns there and was more concerned about the ongoing WWII.
Reacting to New Delhi's request for supply of food grains during the famine, Churchill reportedly said that relief efforts wouldn’t accomplish anything because Indians bred “like rabbits”. To add additional insult under his direction the Cabinet rejected Canadian proposals to send food aid to India. Notwithstanding his disgusting comments about colored people like Indians and Arabs, the defenders of the former leader claimed Winston was a “liberal imperialist”.
Leo Amery likened Churchill's understanding of India's problems to King George III's apathy for the Americas. In his private diaries, the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, wrote "on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane" and that he did not "see much difference between [Churchill's] outlook and Hitler's"