Talk:Bengal famine of 1943

Shipping section UNDUE

Yes, shipping was tight for GB, but when Wavell put his foot down and used his connections to pressure GB into supplying aid (the Statesman photos made a difference too), the aid came mostly from the Punjab.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 03:19, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Hardly 'UNDUE'. Many commentators consider the failure to import was very important - India usually imported 2m tons of grain. The 200,000 tons eventually imported was not enough and came too late for many of the starving. You cannot ignore this just because some well-fed people chose to believe that there was plenty of grain available and imports were unnecessary. It needs verifiable facts. These have however been removed and replaced by inaccurate quotations referring to different periods. AidWorker (talk) 11:20, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Hello AidWorker. As I have mentioned, I am working from a database of over 200 sources (almost all on my computer; I can you send you any you wish). You're welcome to view progress the ongoing top-to-bottom rewrite here. It does mention shipping somewhat briefly in the "Debate over primary cause" section, near the bottom. That brief section shows two opposing views. If you have "many commentators" you wish to share, please do feel free to discuss your sources here on this page.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 11:34, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Undid large-scale edit with vague edit summary "restoring"

• I just undid a very large-scale edit with the vague edit summary "restoring". Restoring what? The cite format was changed, entire sections were removed, etc. Was this a restore to a version from literally years ago?  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 16:26, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia and "genocide" in this particular case

Some editors, and at the moment this specifically refers to 73.202.190.56 (talk · contribs · WHOIS), are eager to increase the general level of social justice in our world by using Wikipedia as a forum for telling the world that this particular famine was a "genocide". That may be a noble goal, but there are two or three problems with using Wikipedia for that purpose. The goal of Wikipedia is Verifiability, not truth. If you can find reliable sources that label this famine a genocide, then you can add that info. Please note that blogs are not reliable sources in this particular case (in most cases, actually). Personal web pages are not reliable sources either. No, you must find a book or journal article by a well-known publisher etc., and even then there are some exceptions, because some sources are more reliable than others.

But wait, there's more. Even if you do find a reliable source that calls this particular famine a case of genocide (and I have looked for months and haven't seen any that would state it so baldly), then you still can't label the famine a genocide if you only found one source that says so but several sources that do not. That would be placing undue weight on the one source that you personally believe in your heart is correct..

This particular famine is extremely, extremely complex. World-class experts like Amartya Sen and Cormac Ó Gráda have argued about it, as also have many other relatively less famous (but still reputable) scholars on a long, long list. So this topic is very debatable. And even among those scholars debating it, "genocide" is a word that is probably too strong for most scholars to be willing to use.

The number of books and articles that cover this topic is huge. So Wikipedia cannot just ignore all this debate and unilaterally make a statement that is so controversial. We must cover a nuanced topic in a nuanced (and balanced, and verifiable) manner.Simple declarations of "genocide" are very, very far from providing a sufficient explanation that would be suitable for a Wikipedia article.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 03:02, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Please add sources to end of intro

Add this immediately after last sentence of intro

{{sfn|Nightingale|McDonald|Vallée|2006|p=707}}<ref>{{cite book |first=M. |last=Davis |title=Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World |publisher=Verso |location=London |year=2001 |isbn=1-85984-739-0 |page=9 |url= |ref=harv}}</ref> Add this to References section * {{citation |title=Florence Nightingale on Health in India |last1=Nightingale |first1=Florence |last2=McDonald |first2=Lynn |last3=Vallée |first3=Gérard |isbn=978-0-88920-468-3 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=amE1cz1fkIkC |year=2006 |publisher=Wilfrid Laurier University Press |location=Waterloo, Ont }}

Information is valid but must be properly cited

(Taking a deep breath) Hi Libdems23. Welcome to Wikipedia. I am very familiar with Florence Nightingale's speech etc. I hope I can bring you up to speed on the state of this article. In a few words, it is massively inadequate. However, this topic is nearly as deep and complex as any non-technical article I have ever seen.

I am working on a complete top-to-bottom rewrite in my personal userspace. NOTE this rewrite is MONTHS from being finished... You are invited to read (but not edit) that rewrite here: User:Lingzhi/sandbox. You are invited to comment about the rewrite here: User talk:Lingzhi/sandbox. As for your concerns: Look down toward the bottom of the rewrite, and you'll see there's a section titled "Debate over primary cause". That's where I'm gonna put the opinions of scholars about why the famine occurred. there are three main schools of thought: it was England's fault because they were incompetent and overwhelmed bunglers; it was England's fault because they were heartless and/or racist, and it was no one's fault but the result of natural disasters. All three will be given their due voice. Here is a very important point: Wikipedia cannot choose among these explanations in this case, because the scholars themselves disagree. We can only report the consensus view, and if there is no consensus, we report each view and say there is no consensus. So... please do be patient... I hope this helps.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 10:07, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

This is racist and inaccurate. Nobody, to my knowledge, believes that it was England's fault. England had no role. The British Government (there is no English government}, the British Cabinet and the War Cabinet had a role - well documented in the standard sources. The Government of India had a role. The Viceroy/Governor General was a Scotsman, not an Englishman. The majority of the elite Indian Civil Service was ethnically Indian, with many of the ethnically European being Indian born. There were for example only 30 'European' members of the Indian Civil Service in Bengal in 1943, including teachers, prison officers, foresters and agriculturists. Within the Indian Civil Service there were at least three conflicting views on the famine, as shown in the Famine Inquiry Commission, Braund, Pinell, Knight and various memoirs and books such as Stevenson. The action taken depended on which faction was on top, and of course Wavell taking over from Linlithgow as Viceroy. If a civil service disagrees with a policy, they can make sure it is not implemented. And the actions, failures to act, and refusals to act of the Provincial Governments were seen at the time and by later commentators to be crucial. The orthodox view, that a shortage caused by natural disasters and wartime problems was allowed to turn into a famine because officials and politicians chose to believe that Bengal had plenty of food does not fit into any of your categories. Many people chose to blame the Military even claiming that they deliberately caused the famine, though the fact that they stood up to Churchill and the War Cabinet is well documented in standard sources, as is the damage that was indeed caused by the military. So the situation is far more complicated than Lingzhi recognizes. Which makes it all the more worrying that people continue to remove academically respectable, though not necessarily right, explanations, any that do not meet their own prejudices, rather than presenting the alternatives.AidWorker (talk) 11:58, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

(Taking an even deeper breath) I'm glad you're familiar with that one source, but there are a dozen more where that came from confirm the same point. I understand that it's important to include all viewpoints on a complex disaster such as this one, but equating the view that this was simply an unavoidable "natural" disaster is analogous to blaming racial disparities between African-Americans and white Americans on "natural" conditions, not on institutional discrimination. While there is a large quantity of academic sources supporting the former hypothesis, they were mostly published before the late 20th century, similar to explanations of the Bengal famine not being the responsibility of the British government. I'm sure you can see why it'd be problematic to provide equal share of the wiki and legitimacy to such opinions of African-Americans, even if such conclusions haven't been drawn about foreigners until recently. Additionally, delineating the different explanations of British responsibility in the way you mentioned isn't necessarily helpful, as most sources I've come across (including on the wiki page) include basic apathy and and resultant incompetence, (along with the fact that, erm, the British were already committing brutal human rights violations in order to continuing colonizing India, and how that relates to the overall good administration of the region) as part of the overall reasoning of why the British willfully had this disaster happen. In other words, I think it's unwise to differentiate the general racism with the apathy/incompetence, when the latter is an aspect of the former. As I've already mentioned, I can provide numerous (more) sources to support these views and others like it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Libdems23 (talk • contribs) 22:09, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

First, the reason to distinguish between them is because the literature itself explicitly draws that distinction and explicitly argues over it. For example (highlights added):

Sen and others have described the famine as the product mainly of bureaucratic bungling and accompanying market failure. I see it instead as largely due to the failure of the British authorities to make good, for war-strategic reasons, a genuine food deficit.

— Ó Gráda, 2009 pp. 190–91

There is strong evidence that there was a food deficit, and indeed there was a failure to import, for reasons largely removed from the page, but it is difficult to argue that there was a war-strategic reason for what many see as bungling: the Chiefs of Imperial General Staff saw the famine as effectively taking India out of the war, and possibly threatening the loss of India. Also recently removed from the page.AidWorker (talk) 11:58, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

In the context of Britain's war in Asia, the Bengal Famine cannot be understood merely as the story of a particularly grotesque form of 'collateral damage' (as it sometimes has been); it must also be understood... as the direct outcome of intentional policies and priorities that many, including high officials in the colonial government, fully recognized would bring dire hardship (and even starvation) to the people of India. In their fight against imperial Japan, Britain and its allies were willing to sacrifice Bengal in order to pursue war elsewhere, as well as to regain their lost supremacy in Asia... The Bengal famine was no 'accident' of war-time 'bungling', but rather was the direct product of colonial and war-time ideologies and calculations that (knowingly) exposed the poor of Bengal to annihilation through deprivation.

— Mukherjee, 2015, pp. 251–52

The key point is that we cannot filter the literature through the lens of our own perceptions of Truth and emphasize Truth as we see it (that would be a violation of WP:NPOV); we can only report what the literature says... the whole body of the literature, I mean.

Second, it's not the case at all that I'm only familiar with one source. Glancing at the "Bengal" directory/folder on the computer I'm using at this moment, I see...hmmm... 129 pdf documents... but let's assume some of those are duplicates and say OK maybe 110 or so. And I have read them. Some of them I have read repeatedly. I'm not bragging or trying to say I have some superior degree of authority. I'm just trying to bring you into this conversation fully informed about its participants.  Lingzhi ♦ (talk) 01:14, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

Collecting a large number of papers on the subject only helps slightly: much more difficult and vastly more important is to collect the evidence (it has taken me thirty years in libraries and swopping with other researchers). Then, to analyse it, you need to know an awful lot of agricultural economics, including agricultural market economics, food policy, agricultural statistics, and the political economy of agriculture. And a decade or so of working in government in a grain-staple developing country to put it into context. This is emphatically not a task for postgrads.AidWorker (talk) 15:48, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

Referencing

Could people confine themselves to the standard academic referencing. Do not reference Singh 2018 for a fact on what happened in 1943: he or she cannot possibly have observed it. Find Singh's source and give the reference as Mahalanobis (1943) cited in Singh (2018). Better still, find Mahalanobis, check what he did in fact say and its contex, and give the Mahalanobis reference. It is never satisfactory to give second hand references, and they should be avoided in Wikipedia wherever possible. In this case, where the facts are 73 years old, the probability is that A cited B, who cited C, who cited D, who cited E, so the reference has probably been garbled. In fact, E is likely to have cited F who made it up, or to have found it on someone's blog. Since the subject is very political it is very common for people to make up facts, to distort them, to leave out the context, to hide the fact that the original author surrounded the statement with caveats, to leave out the next three sentences saying why the original author rejected this hypothesis etc. All meaning that you should check the original source. And when commentators disagree on the facts, using the same sources, Wikipedia needs to know what the original source said.

And of course proper referencing means that it is easy for readers to get copies of the originals.AidWorker (talk) 16:04, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

On the contrary, Wikipedia should cite recent scholarship as much as possible, earlier scholarship less, and primary sources rarely and very carefully. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, which is completely different from academic research. Original sources are vital in academic research, but have little or no place in an encyclopedia, which by definition is a summary of the existing scholarship. Editors have no business performing their own analysis of original sources. --Worldbruce (talk) 18:19, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

On the contrary, failure to check citations makes the entry useless or worse. Similarly, failure to check statements against a range of scholarship makes bias inevitable. You end up with fabricated evidence supporting conspiracy theories and outright invention. As has happened on this page from time to time.

COMMENTS ON ARTICLE AS AT 25 JANUARY

The introduction has been modified to produce major falsehoods in the first paragraph. Originally it had the statement Estimates are that between 1.5 and 4 million people died of starvation, malnutrition and disease, out of Bengal’s 60.3 million population, half of them dying from disease after food became available in December 1943 This has been changed to Approximately 3 million people died due to famine. Generally the estimates are between 1.5 and 4 million, taking into account deaths due to starvation, malnutrition and disease, out of Bengal's 60.3 million population. That is to say a) A perfectly balanced statement and defensible statement, academically respectable, has been removed. The reference to the standard paper on the subject, (Dyson and Maharatna) has been removed, effectively removing the links to a discussion of data problems and how people reached such a range of results. b) The editor has replaced it with his own preference, choosing two papers which happened to agree with him. c) The Sen paper cited is dodgy at best, comparing the results of one unreliable developing country census with one grossly unreliable census, and ignoring the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of Partition which could well have explained the apparent excess mortality. The Dyson and Maharatna paper points to further ‘errors’ as was made clear elsewhere in the Wikipedia article. d) The Lazarro reference is due to a 788-word set of statements on a web site, one which gives no referencing and makes a string of other errors. There is no reference or explanation for his figure of 3 million dead. There is no excuse for citing this rubbish on Wikipedia. e) The correct reference for the 1.5 to 4 million people, (Dyson and Maharatna) was replaced by a reference to something written by a David Myers on a website. I have not been able to check this because my virus checker says the website is dangerous. Nor have I been able to find anything about David Myers and Bengal on the internet.

In the same paragraph the statement ‘Although food production was higher in 1943 compared to 1941, demand exceeded the supply.’ This is a highly contentious statement, again attributed to Myers. But the section in Wikipedia, drawing on Dewey’s magisterial work, shows that contemporary statisticians were agreed that the statistics available were meaningless and no such conclusions could be drawn. The Indian statisticians who developed the systems used worldwide now produced further evidence that the statistics were not just meaningless but biased. Anyone who has the most basic knowledge of agricultural statistics, indeed anyone who has done Statistics 1 in any social science must agree. A major function of Wikipedia is to say where no evidence exists, not to present fantasies and wild guesses which have no evidence to support them.

Similar changes appear throughout the re-edit. In addition, large chunks summarizing mainstream views have been removed. The effect of the military is of more than passing interest; many people in the former Bengal and Pakistan have been raised to believe that Punjab ‘deliberately starved Bengal’; that there is a school of thought that massive corruption and the breakdown of the social system was more important than lack of food; that there is a school of thought that there has been no famine in a democracy; that there is widespread ignorance of who had what powers at the time etc. No doubt all these sections could be improved, but they cannot be removed because one person has different views.

I would ask that whoever was responsible for these changes makes no further changes of any sort whatsoever to this article.AidWorker (talk) 11:37, 27 January 2017 (UTC)