As journalist Madhusree Mukerjee reveals in this account of shocking rapacity, even as Winston Churchill brilliantly opposed the barbarism of the Nazis, he governed India with a fierce resolve to crush its freedom movement, and with a profound contempt for native lives. A series of Churchill's decisions between 1940 and 1944 directly and inevitably led to the deaths of some three million Indians; instead of sending emergency food shipments to famine-struck Bengal, Churchill used the wheat and ships at his disposal to build stockpiles for feeding postwar Britain and Europe. Churchill may have found victory in Europe, but as this groundbreaking historical investigation reveals, his mismanagement—facilitated by dubious advice from scientist and eugenicist Lord Cherwell—devastated India and set the stage for the massive bloodletting that accompanied independence.
"Mukerjee has researched this forgotten holocaust with great care and forensic rigor.... Her calmly phrased but searing account of imperial brutality will shame admirers of the Greatest Briton and horrify just about everybody else."—Independent (UK)