Sunday Posts

Madhusree Mukherjee has written an important book. Churchill's Secret War chronicles the story of the Great Bengal Famine, a famine almost deliberately engineered by the British War Administration, under the excuse of supply to British troops, but also with a deeper agenda of crushing the Indian Independence Movement beyond repair. The 1943 famine in Bengal killed three million people. The famine affected a generation and accentuated the city/village divide which persists even today. Economists, particularly Amartya Sen, has made efforts to prove that this devastating famine did not happen due to shortage of food. Ms Mukherjee argues that this had happened to a deliberate policy of the British War Administration of diverting food supplies from Bengal to Ceylon and then onto the British troops in Burma and elsewhere. Professor Sen has talked about the 'entitlement problem' and Ms Mukherjee also points to the practice of British Administration of buying grains at an in...

No country in the world can dare to behave like Israel, not even North Korea. When we lampoon Iran for violations of International Law, we talk about Israel's ability to go and strike within the sovereign Iranian territory at the same time. When we condemn human rights abuses by Burma, we gloss over the fact that Israelis can literally bulldoze homes and people, and also anyone, like Rachel Corrie, who comes in between . We invade countries to stop them from using weapons of mass destruction, but turn a blind eye when Israel uses deadly chemicals on, of all places, UN offices. We are just embarrassed when Israel copies our passports, steals our identities and go across the national borders to carry out political assassinations . We put sanctions against Iran for developing nuclear centrifuges, but keep mum about the Israeli weapons. If the usual standards were applied, Israel would be world's biggest and most consistent state sponsor of terrorism, the largest arms smuggler, the...